Module 9- Flow Mapping

This week I created another thematic map and the focus continued to be on design. I created a distributive flow map depicting the worldwide immigration flow into the United States using statistics from 2007.

We were provided with outlines for both the world map and the associated scale bar in a .cdr file to work with in CorelDRAW 7. The initial graphic also included the U.S. Map and scale bar. All of the editing this week was completed in Corel so maintaining map scale while moving elements around was crucial. 

The major topic this week was flow mapping which is why the world map with flow lines is the largest element in my graphic. All of the flow lines are proportional to the amounts of immigrants flowing from each continent. Originally I planned on only using black flow lines but with the overlapping lines I decided that using colors made the map a little easier to follow. I also added a drop shadow to all of the lines to make them stand out against the background without distracting from the map like a bold solid outline would. The background is an elliptical fountain fill instead of a solid fill because it helped balance the different shades of light colors on the map.

The inset map is a choropleth map depicting the percent of immigrants per state. I only applied minimal changes to the choropleth map, primarily adjusting the location of Alaska and Hawaii so everything would fit inside the neatline. I created the legend for the inset map solely using Corel. I thought this would be one of the more difficult aspects of this week's lab but quickly found out how simple it could be. With the help of the color dropper tool to identify fill colors the legend only took about a two minutes to create. I cannot say the same about the drop shadows around the flow lines because they took me at least an hour to adjust.