tl;dr - here’s the map!
Like most of you, I got excited when heard about the Monochrome Mapping Competition announced by Daniel Huffman back in May. Mostly I was looking for an excuse to take a break from web-mapping and do an old fashioned print map.
The subject for this work is the Newport News Green Foundation. This local organization preserves spaces (vacant lots, donated properties, etc) to keep our city beautiful and GREEEN. There’s a preserved space around the corner from my house and it’s pretty common to see kids playing football or just hanging out. Some of the spaces are natural wetlands, some are gardens, all are awesome.
It was an obvious choice to use the color GREEN for this map - although I was a bit hesitant due to the fact one of my previous print maps uses mostly a GREEN shade - but as my pupils, retina, and eyes can attest - these are two different hues of GREEN. And there’s not really any way I could feature the Newport News Green Foundation without using the color GREEN.
This print is a whopping 3ft x 3ft and was done over the last few weeks using ArcGIS Pro. The main map of Newport News is rotated at an absolute north hating 58 degrees and features pavement, building, hydrography, and boundaries - all in various shades of #18A558. Like the one city map project, local place names and points of interest are used sparingly to orient the viewer. Each property is highlighted across the city map using both offset property boundaries and points with vertical alignment to their labels which span across the top of the print. A schematic/site plan style detail is included for each of the foundations 21 properties, ordered left to right, or north to south through their location in the city to correspond to the other map elements.
Each of these site maps include property lines, pavement lines, building footprints, contours, and relevant road and place labels. The neatest of these being randomly generated tree point symbology to fill in the vegetation layer. All 21 sites were created in a separate project, exported as high-res images and then inserted into the final layout. This was done carefully, making full use of the rulers, guidelines, and magic.
Details about the foundation, data, and design span across the bottom of the print and just to let you know #northisasocietalconstruct, an overview map sits in a cozy nook between the 2 main map sections. Speaking of which, half of the print works just as good as the rest.
Data for this project came from the City of Newport News Open Data, the Newport News Green Foundation, and © OpenStreetMap contributors. Got questions or comments? Feel free to email me or hit me up on twitter.