Reference Map of Owatonna, Minnesota

The purpose of this map was to serve as reference map for my hometown Owatonna, Minnesota. I chose the locations on the map because they are features of my hometown that I visited most often. Owatonna is a city of about 25,000 people, so it is pretty clear that I did not include all of the roads in the map. Instead, I generalized and highlighted the main roads. The colors depicted in legend were chosen based on conceptual color associations with types of city and natural structures; I picture commercial land as being harsh, ergo red, and schools being yellow because of the color of school buses. The map was modeled directly from a screenshot of Google Earth. I then brought the image into Adobe Illustrator and proceeded to digitize all of it, thus making polygons and lines. I also added my own labels, which was likely the hardest part because of lack of space for labels. Because I have lived there all of my life is was easy to decide which roads to highlight. My knowledge of Owatonna’s layout and street names, etc were handy in categorizing and labeling the map if certain locations were not given labels by Google Earth.