Sketch Route Map

With my map, I wanted to define a clear route from my dorm, which is Stonewall Three, to the Global Heritage Hall. As a graphic design major, the majority of my classes are held in the Global Heritage Hall. I also have many meetings held there, and enjoy spending time in the atrium visiting Starbucks and doing homework. Overall, it is the place where I spend most of my time on campus (aside from my dorm). It is not a far walk, but certain factors including winter weather, and the recent construction on campus have required me to seek new paths to GHH, and here I am showing the route that I find to be best. I wanted to share this because I think that it could be useful for some other people. Since there are many paths that can be taken to GHH, I had to use decision making to determine which path I want to take. Within my map, I show a path that goes over the bridge by the pond, past the gazebo, through the Gabelli School of business, and right across the street into GHH.

The largest struggle that I had when it came to making my map, was making it to scale, and somehow conveying the three dimensional space between buildings in all directions on a flat piece of paper. I began with my starting and ending points. I then tried to mark the two most prominent landmarks of the walk, which are the bridge and the school of business. Setting these four pieces in place helped me to more accurately scale and place the other landmarks of campus in relation to each of these. I started my map drawing two dimensional buildings, but as I went on I began to try to add a bit of depth to the buildings to help the reader better understand how the space was working.

I think that my “AHA” moment came with this idea. As soon as a drew one building with a little bit of dimension, I realized that I needed to have a point of starting perspective to build off of for the map to make sense to the eye. Once I had that point of origin to go off of, it was much easier to create my map and work with the space and scale effectively.

When it came to the decisions I made about the design of the map, I decided to try and keep it very simple and only highlight things that needed to be, because as Ware says “There are strict limits as to how many colors can be used effectively as codes” (pg 77). The most prominent color, pink, was used for the route itself because it stood out and wouldn’t be mistaken for any other natural landmark. I used blue to highlight the pond, since the bridge going over it is one of the most important parts of the route, and blue makes the pond very recognizable as water. Finally, I used green to highlight the grassy areas around the school of business, another important landmark, to help the reader discern which way they should be going in relation to the grassy areas. Green is another color that also helped make the grass recognizable as grass. This map displays both parallel and serial processing, since the route as a whole can be looked at and understood using the landmarks to create a whole mental image. However, it can also be taken piece by piece as you go along the path. I also used salience in my map, to make the important landmarks and turns stand out to the eye through color. Finally, as McCloud argues in chapter 5, different styles of lines can create different feelings in an observer, so I tried to keep my lines simple and clear so as not to be distracting.

If I had more time, I would spend more time making sure that my scale was perfect, since I loosely estimated with the tools available to me. I would go out and measure certain areas so that it was perfectly accurate.

I decided to zoom in on the area of my map that focuses on the portion of the path around the business school, since this is the portion that has changed recently. Due to the construction, you can no longer go left around the business school, so I wanted to emphasize the fact that I now go through the business school.