John Muir Trail never looked sweeter

Behold, my 2nd map. This assignment we were told to make a map of the John Muir Trail which is located inside the Sequoia National Park.

The most important feature of this map obviously is the John Muir Trail itself. I experimented with various thicknesses of the trail, masks, and tried several different spacing to compose the trail itself.  One thing that I did in the end was design the other trails on the map with the same special design as the John Muir Trail.  Obviously they were thinner and a less prominent color to not stand out as much. But making them adhere to the same spatial design I felt was important so the viewer knew it was the same type of road (trail).

I didn’t particularly like the way the paved roads turned out, but that is just the way they are drawn up in the database.  I’m curious why they look so twisty and twirly and not more like actual roads.

I tried to adhere to a color scheme, even incorporating it into my scale, north arrow, and fonts.   I like the placement of my north arrow, and I tried various scales but ultimately I thought placing it dead center of the map was the best bet.

I thought my legend came out nice, even made the trails and roads an S shape for something different. We were told to include the total length of the John Muir Trail somewhere in the legend. I thought the best place for this was simply right next to it. Not really happy with that though because it looks so random as if it’s just floating out there for no reason. I considered putting an asterisk * next to the JMT and placing the length at the bottom, but decided against it.