Virginia, Maryland, Washington Map (Lab 5)

There were several challenging parts to this lab: One- We had to make a scale "from scratch", Two- We had to deal with labeling features that have the same value (MD, VA, DC) yet are much larger or smaller than each other, Three- Various visual features were hard to balance (the background gradient, the thickness of the county vs state lines, figure-ground issues).

My solutions to the problems (in order), were,
-- 1. I measured the distance of Virginia's southern border in ArcMap, I measured the same on my printed map, and then using simple mathematics I calculated what the scale would be for my printed map. I then did a little more math to find how many inches 50 miles would be (just over an inch), and made the scale bar using the line tool in Illustrator. [I made the scale bar in part because it maintains its accuracy even when blown up or shrunk...I am almost certain that the 1 inch=48 miles verbal scale is wrong on the image.]
-- 2a. At first my solution to the "labelling Washington" problem was to point a line out eastward from Washington, and connect it to a box with the words "Washington, DC" inside it. I abandoned this idea because I thought it looked bad, and instead decided to create an inset around the immediate Washington Metro Area, so that I could actually label the city of Washington on the map. To do this I had to use the clipping mask tool.
-- 2b. I decided against labelling "Virginia" much bigger just to fill up the state, and instead made it the same size as the "Maryland" label. I figured that visual balance is more important than taking up all the space, a 40-pt Virginia label vs a 24-pt Maryland would look terrible. (One other strange thing is that my eye sees the Maryland label as bigger than the Virginia label even though checking and rechecking keeps telling me they are both 24-pt...)
-- 3. At first I had a gradient radiating out from a single corner, but this left a lot of white space. I decided to create four separate gradients coming from each corner. I also made the counties dark grey for contrast purposes.

One other thing: he scale is correct on paper