Flowy Lines of Migrants

This week's lesson in cartography was in flow lines. Essentially, they're nice long, flowing lines with an arrow on one end. (In simplistic terms.) We were tasked with creating a flow line map that displays immigration by continent to the US. During this process I realized something, AI is not meant for maps. Thank god the file we were given already had the layers organized. Exporting an arc map to AI, creates such chaos on the layer front. I digress.

In making this map, I first considered how the lines would work. I decided to have all the lines run into each other. I did this to reduce clutter. I do regret, however, making each line a different color. Looking at it below, I feel it didn't quite come out the way I wanted. It's hard to see the Oceania line, for example. I then changed the color of each continent, except for the US. For the US, I changed the color to a red so it could stand out. Europe, sadly, looks washed out. (oh the pain of last minute work).  For the insert, I didn't go with an at scale. I blew up Hawaii and Alaska, though I kept their directionality. I made the legend in ArcGIS and then copied it over to AI.

I made a legend using the arrows and matching the arrows to the line width I figured out in the lab exercise (5pt being the maximum). I then put the respective number of immigrants next to each one.

I added drop shadows where I though would best show the lines and other information. Also, I like to keep things simple. I felt the large white border with the space to show my legend without a neatline, worked well. I felt my color choice on the map is also simple. The colors aren't too bright. I find the colors to be demur.

I like the central concept of flow lines, however, I'm I feel most stories can be told in better ways than with flow lines. They're thematic and can look compelling but also can clutter the map quite easily.