GIS 4006 Cartography M3 Lab - Visual Hierarchy and Gestalt Principles

This was an interesting lab, where we got a map area that produced a lot of empty space around the relevant areas, and had to make a map that utilized Gestalt design principles. Gestalt is a system for understanding human perception, and how human beings summarize the individual parts of what they see into a coherent whole. For instance, the Gestalt principle of closure states that we will fill in the missing parts of an image with enough information. In this map, I tried to utilize the principle of figure-ground, where visual cues indicate something is closer or more important to the viewer. In this map, the locator shows ward 7 within Washington, D.C., while the main map is zoomed on Ward 7, and excess noise in the form of labeling, competing visual information, unimportant map space, etc. is all minimized. Deliberate design choices included not labeling roads and instead suggesting their importance by line weight, not showing surface roads outside Ward 7, using a muted basemap, de-emphasizing labeled neighborhoods, and using symbology for schools that was graduated in size and gradated by color.