A Population Analysis

For the first week of class, we were asked to produce a map that displayed all the towns and cities of Massachusetts according to their populations on a 81/2 by 11 frame, in black in white, uploaded to the internet in PDF format. The following map is what I came up with using Esri's ArcMap GIS software and population data from MassGIS. This was my first real attempt to produce a professionally formatted map using the software so it required me to refine some of my techniques learned  in GIS 1. I am proud of the result for a first try but as with anything, I now see a little room for improvement.

I started by importing the Massachusetts town boundaries layer from MassGIS and used the population data included to color each town. My first challenge was figuring out a way to classify the populations in the legend in a way that would be logical and useful. The problem was made difficult by the outliers of the data which, due to the disproportionate numbers of towns with similar populations, made the map almost entirely one category. The default methods for data classification offered in ArcMap did not display the data well so I decided to create my own intervals in the legend. I set them up based on what I figured would represent the towns sizes well, (0-1000 representing small towns, 1001-10000 representing mid-size towns, etc). Looking back, the better option would have probably been to base the intervals on the criteria that is generally accepted in town classification. After managing the legend issue, all that was left  was some aesthetic touch-ups including a neat-line, shading, town border colors, and of course, a scale bar and north arrow.