This activity was designed to increase our familiarity with Adobe Illustrator CS5 and the challenges of cartographic generalization by producing a reference map of somewhere special to us. I chose my hometown of Hudson WI. The map needed to include typical map design elements such as a title, a legend, a scale, etc. and reflect the essentials of map design (figure-ground, legibility, clarity, balance, and visual hierarchy).
Though we could have done anywhere we liked I did my home town. It was hard to try to decide what was important enough to add, what would be appealing to tourists and what wouldn't. The river, the lakes, and all the parks were the first things I added. Then the major roads the golf course and the hospital. I wasn't really sure what else to add after that so I added our two main shopping areas and schools. I used two different colors for the water bodies because one was a lake and the other was a river and I was trying to distinguish them as such. Green for parks because I thought that made the most sense and purple and dark blue for the other things because those are my favorite colors. I think it's a decent map, I could have added a few more things like the library and if I had made the map slightly bigger the movie theater.