Module 2 - Cartography - Introduction to Adobe Illustrator

This week in Cartography, we learned the basics of using Adobe Illustrator in conjunction with ArcMap.
The above map of the cities and counties of Florida looks very basic and simple, but it involved a very absorbing lesson in managing layers in Illustrator!  We opened the map data in ArcMap, then immediately exported to Illustrator to rearrange the layers.  Our goal was to put the counties, cities and scale bar layers in a single layer group so that they will remain consistent to each other  when any one of them is  re-sized or moved.  In order to do this, we had to parse out the elements of the scale bar from those of the legend.   It was an interesting lesson.  We also tabulated the metadata for this map.  The lesson on datums, ellipses and coordinate systems helped make sense of that part.