For the Artifact Map, I created a map that gave geographic directions. I mapped out the path from my home to St. Edward’s campus. I also wanted to include points of interest to students, such as food, groceries, and gas. Unfortunately only the final draft is available, not processes.

In the beginning, I didn’t know how to plot out the two paths or what chloropleth to feature. In the end, I used different colors for each path and used traffic amounts as a chloropleth because this would be most beneficial to a commuter using the map. . The colors turned out to be distracting, and this is especially true for my beginning and end points which were bright red and green at first. Also, I had a small grey patch with represented the airport and this grey shot out immediately on the white page. After toning down the grey to a lighter shade, I replaced the paths with dotted and dashed lines to show their differences without being distracting. Also the end/ start points are the same color, just different shapes.

Another factor of this project was plotting out points of stop lights. I had an icon but this meshed in too much with the other icons and made the map visually busy. I had to simplify so I turned them into red octogons but that was still too distracting. I made them into softer green diamonds to soothe it out.  For the traffic chloropleth I used red, orange, and yellow at the start to show different levels of traffic congestion but this also was too distracting. I simplified to one color, orange, and differentiated the shades used.