Map Blog: The Final Draft
What is really interesting and cool about this map, having been made in illustrator, is it is a tracing of our second hand-drawn map. So even though it isn’t hand-drawn, it technically is. Another thing about this map is its purposefully slanted text. The slant helps give the drawing a human-like feel to it, along with our font choice. People don’t usually write in a perfect horizontal alignment without the guidance of a straight line but, rather, write in a consistent slant as we are creatures of habit. The font and the use of the lower-case letters produce a simple and child-like feel for the map.
The colored bubbles came out nicely in my opinion and are an inviting component of the map.
We ran into a few problems because there are only so many colors to choose from and still be distinguishable to the male eye.
Our artist statement is below followed by our final map!
The audience for our map is incoming (first year) Christian students. For these students, coming to college can feel isolating. They don’t know where to go yet to find a community of faith, and it can seem like there are limited resources. We made our map with the purpose to welcome them, show them that they’re not alone, make them feel comfortable, and to show them the closest churches to WPI.
To achieve this goal, we made our design decisions carefully. From the beginning, we knew that we would be limited by distance. First year students do not have cars, so they only way they can get places reliably is by walking. We decided that ¾ of a mile would be the maximum distance that we’d put on our map, because walking further than ¾ of a mile in Worcester becomes unreasonable.
The second design consideration we had to make was how to show information. We wanted to show distance and the denomination of the church. To convey distance, we included the biggest streets around WPI. This shows people the approximate locations of the churches, which allows them to approximate how long it will take them to walk there. It also shows them where the church is in relation to WPI, which solves a spatial relation problem of feeling like there’s no church nearby. To show the denomination of the church, we used colors to color-code the different denominations. In addition to conveying information, these colors also serve to make the map seem warm, inviting, and inclusive; there’s a space for everyone, and it’s even close to campus. Unfortunately, due to how many colors we needed to use (and because they needed to be pastel for the sake of readability), some churches look less appealing than others, and the map looks more feminine than masculine.