Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Lab 8 was so cool. I found this map at the Library of Congress website. Spending a lot of time in Military Geography this semester has my min d on battles and battle maps.
This map is cartography on the fly 1862 style. It is a copy of a map made for a Major-General of the march that the Federal forces took after they lost the Pennisula Campaign of 1862. I really like the colors, it is easy to see that it was drawn with a quill-style pen and bottled ink. The colors are still great and the contrast between them is wonderful, the choices are great.
I tried to add as little as possible that would intrude on the readers enjoyment of the map. I added the zoom/pan tools in the closest color of the march as possible. I "hand drew" the arrows in keeping with the style of the map. Initially I had them in a line on the right hand side of the map. I think this configuration is the most complementary to the map itself. But when you start to use the tools and the map gets bigger the vertical line of tools stands out as odd. So I went back to the Google Square style. I did not add the diagonal pans because the map is not that big and I found them distracting.
It really is amazing how important conventions are and where they come from. While I have not spend any time at all investigating this, I will wager that the reason those pan/zooms are always on the right is because most of the world are right handed mouse users. It's just wierd to have the tools on the left, I had to go all the way over to the other side to pan around. Even my left-handed husband is a right handed mouse user. So, while I tried it and thought that placing the tools on the left would be less intrusive on the map I had to go with the right hand side.
I added a splash screen for fun. I like the effect of bringing the colors in and I thought it would make it maybe a little easier to read the top scripts--assuming of course that I have interpreted them correctly!
This map is cartography on the fly 1862 style. It is a copy of a map made for a Major-General of the march that the Federal forces took after they lost the Pennisula Campaign of 1862. I really like the colors, it is easy to see that it was drawn with a quill-style pen and bottled ink. The colors are still great and the contrast between them is wonderful, the choices are great.
I tried to add as little as possible that would intrude on the readers enjoyment of the map. I added the zoom/pan tools in the closest color of the march as possible. I "hand drew" the arrows in keeping with the style of the map. Initially I had them in a line on the right hand side of the map. I think this configuration is the most complementary to the map itself. But when you start to use the tools and the map gets bigger the vertical line of tools stands out as odd. So I went back to the Google Square style. I did not add the diagonal pans because the map is not that big and I found them distracting.
It really is amazing how important conventions are and where they come from. While I have not spend any time at all investigating this, I will wager that the reason those pan/zooms are always on the right is because most of the world are right handed mouse users. It's just wierd to have the tools on the left, I had to go all the way over to the other side to pan around. Even my left-handed husband is a right handed mouse user. So, while I tried it and thought that placing the tools on the left would be less intrusive on the map I had to go with the right hand side.
I added a splash screen for fun. I like the effect of bringing the colors in and I thought it would make it maybe a little easier to read the top scripts--assuming of course that I have interpreted them correctly!
// posted by Elizabeth Hull @ 5:21 PM 
