FINAL!

Whew, oh this final.  This final's objective was to create from scratch a map of the United States showing both the participation rate and the mean score for either the SAT or the ACT.  I chose to use the SAT because that is what I took however, the data for both was provided.  We were given quite a bit of time to create both the map and our summary.  The summary was not too bad to complete because it was fairly straight forward.  The map on the other hand was more difficult because I felt that I had to reign in my "want to go nuts" in order to create a more professional and polished product.  I can say with complete certainty that this project really utilized the skills that I have learned over this semester in many ways such as projections, data classification, stylistic effects, proportional symbol creation and I'm sure there are some others that I'm forgetting.  I chose to use the choropleth and proportional symbol mapping methods because I felt that both of those were suited to displaying the data required.  I needed to think about many things in the creation of this map such as figure ground distinction, using the usable map space and placement of items.  To create this map I used a combination of ArcMap and Adobe Illustrator.  First I imported the data from a previous lab then chaged the projection because I felt that the Lambert projection had a little more geographical layout than that Alberts.  Once I changed the projection I then imported the table that I created in Excel by cutting out the part of the SAT data PDF that I needed.  This allowed me to directly import the participation rates to create the cloropleth map.  I used ColorBrewer to help me decide on a color scheme to use.  Once I had decided I chose one at random in ArcMap then applied the legend, north arrow, labels and scale bar.  I exported this to Adobe Illustrator and imported the color scheme that I downloaded from ColorBrewer.  Once in AI I needed to edit all of the layers because when you import there are a lot of paths that you don't really need.  After deleting these I was ready to go.  I then changed the color scheme, arranged the map as well as resizing it making sure to include the scale bar because otherwise the scale would be off.  I created the symbols by importing it from the internet and creating a clipping path around the circle itself.  Once the symbol was created I then had to scale them for the data.  I did this by taking the cube root of the SAT mean score which I calculated by adding up the scores then dividing by 3 to get the mean.  Once the cube root was found I then manually scaled them based upon the largest symbol size I wanted.  Once this was done I then placed them on the map along with the state labels.  This is what I ended up with: