My Home[base]

This was an exercise in refreshing skills and independently combining various techniques in an effort to simply introduce laypeople to a new environment.

 

1. Building locations are designated using Esri "Civic" style reference images. The Pinkerton building is the home of the urban studies department of UWT, while the Metro and Swiss provide non-/alcoholic refreshment respectively.

2. Site locations are primary source data, personally acquired via "GPS v.4.1" from Petosoft, a free GPS tracker available on iOS. Data gathered in a different geographic coordinate system and projected coordinate system were transformed and projected into the proper format to match and show up with the other data.

3. Streets are all depicted by the "arterial" preset and to mark locations, not reflect relative sizes of roads.

4. Water Bodies and Parks are marked by both colors (from the "civic" style reference) and shapes to indicate their general planned vs. natural states. This uses secondary source data which can often be out-of-date as opposed to hiring someone with experience to confirm data.

 

5. Transparency behind elements displayed over the map is not actually a standard option on ArcGIS 10.2.1. This effect had to be faked by constructing a shapefile underneath invisible text boxes, and setting the layer to an appropriate percentage of transparency. This allows the text to still be read make it clear the legend is not covering any important components of the map.