Mapping Project: Cognitive Map

 

Our final map was probably my favorite project thus far in Graphic Design I: making a decision map. An avid fan of these, logic is what makes them work. The website Buzzfeed has many of these maps that I enjoy working through in my spare time.

The reason why I chose to do which city you should move to was because I am in this predicament. By the time I was eight, I had lived in three different continents, and by the time I graduated high school, I had lived in eleven different houses. Thus, after I graduate from St. Edward’s, I need to figure out what is next in my path.

Again, I used Excel to do my researching, looking up education systems in each city, living costs, job availability, etc. I enjoyed this project immensely because I got to play around with the characteristics of each city, trying to find icons and fonts that would best describe them. I had the woody, dark greens of Portland, but also the jazzy purples of New Orleans. My skills on Illustrator were improved dramatically with this, as I had to use tools such as Pathfinder to create all the icons. It was a fun, light-hearted design that matches with the mood I was aiming for.