#the second picture has two outline version one thick one thin :3

[optimisticrunawaygalaxy]

[uiblog007]

Visual Hierarchy to create impactful interface:

Article: https://uxplanet.org/how-to-use-visual-hierarchy-to-create-impactful-interfaces-cea400b6eea5

What is visual hierarchy in design?: 

To organise and prioritize page elements by thier importance. 

If visual design is a way to communicate information, visual hierarchy is about communicating this information effectively. Content produced in mind is easy to consume and understand. 

Visual Hierarchy

is one of the approaches to control user attention. By making one component more dominant than the others, designers can influence how people navigate on the page or hint what actions they want users to take and in what order. 

The most basic visual hierarchy rules originate from Gesalt Principles: Gesalt psychology founded in the 20th century in Austria and germany, provided the foundation for the modern study of perception. Gestaltist studeied how humans recognize and interpret sensory information. They discovered that our brain tends to simplify sophisticated images or designs by defining patterns, grouping similar elements, considering them a part of an organised systems. 

Just as human brain finds structure and order in chaotic visuals, principles of visual hierarchy when applied correctly, allow for creating design that ensures seamless interacgtion with your product. 

Developing a wireframe: How to organise page elements across the interface: 

To understand how people percieve visual information, particularaly how they view and explore pages, allows designers to develop solutions with intuitive interfaces that also being aesthetic pleasure. It’s also cruicial to keep in midn a goal a user must achieve on the page. 

Digital product starts with wireframing, representing design at a structural level. A wireframe is usually a static visualisation of a web page that shows the location and basic appearance of interface components -buttons, text and image blocks, a logo, a menu panel etc. As interface elements provide certain functionality, the wireframe also depicts interface features. 

Choose a focal point and differentiate it:  According to the model of visual gierarchy proposed by Microsoft’s Pete Faraday in visually critiquing web pages, a research paper, gaze patterns are guided by two cognitive processes: initial searching and susequent scanning. During the search, a person tries to find an entry point to the page - a focal point/point of interest. The larges objects would seem the most important for uers, and trhey would look at them first. So, one can change the size of a design component to turn it into a focal point. 

During subsequent scanning, the user extracts information around the entry point. That’s why you can plave a text block with imporant information near the focal point. which can be a key phrase in a sebtebce to be sure visitors read the text, too. 

Place important information ‘above the fold’  The concept of above the fold or upper fold has been around since print publishing times. Since newspaper had to be folded in half when sold on newsstands, publishers used large headlines with the hottest news and pictures on the top half of the page to draw people’s attention. 

In a digital world, above the fold content is the content that’s visible without scrolling. “Believe in the fold” say the experts from the Nielsen Norman Group because content above the fold has an avergae 84% viewability than the below the fond one. 

Consider how people view pages and adjust page layout accordingly.  Keep in mind gaze patterns to place interface components to your advantage. 

F-Pattern. People who read left to right scan pages in the same way. In 2006, Jakod Nielsen and his colleagues at the Nielsen Norman Group carried out an eye tracking study during which they recorded how 232 people were looking at websites pages. They discovered a reading pattern that resembles the F shapes and is characterized by manny fixations concentrated at the top and left side of the page. 

Firstly: users read horizontally the upper part of the content area

Then: They move down the page and read another line the same way. the second line is shorter than the first one. 

Lastly, users vertically scan the content’s left side. 

This finding suggest that people would read first lines of text on a page more carefully than the rest. Also, readers will fixate on the first few words of each line more than subsequent words on the same line. 

However, it’s possible to change the F-shape viewing pattern buy creating a more complex visual hierarchy. One of the ways is to add impages of faes to the right side of the page above the fold

Z-Pattern. Contrary to the F-pattern you can break to aud your business goals, it’s better to adjust your page layout to Z-pattern. This gaze pattern applies to pages with minimum text such as landing pages. 

Users explore simply designed pages this way: 

The user scans the top of the page horizontally

Then the user moves their slight diagonally to the page’s opposite corner

Finally, a person’s eyes move horizonally to the lower part of the page. 

So, to follow the Z-pattern, align important components like a logo across the top horizontal line, place information leading to call-toaction button. Important information must be located in the corners. 

An Example of a Z-pattern page is Facebook’s landing page: 

Golden ratio for design composition:  Balance the location and size of interface components by using the golden ratio. This ratio is a mathematical proportion between differently sized elements, and its considered to bring the greatest aesthetic pleasure. 

With the golden ration, designers can define how much area they should leave between design elements to ensure the design is both fucntional and harmonised. Using these proportions can help make the right amount of whitespace. 

White space is an effective technique to create a visual hierarchy: A standalone object catches the viewer’s attention. And the more whitespace around it, the more notcieable the object is. 

The whitespace rule is connected with the Gesalt principle of Proximity. According to the principle, similar objects would seem unrelated to each other if seperated with whitespace. On the contrary, elements that are close to each other would appear as a group even if their shapes and sizes are different 

Creating Mockup: how to incorporate colors and text formates:  When a painter creates a landscape, they first sketch with a pencil: set horizontal between the sky and the ground, place tree shapes, add a road on a field, a building, or other eye-catching objects. In web design terms, an artist first draws a wireframe, and then breathes life into the outline with oaunted color and detail. The more detailed illustration of a product with color and images is called mockup. The goal creating a mockup is to make desugn choices that would differenciate the product from other products, highlight it’s features and value, as well as reflect a brand’s philosophy. 

Use saturated colors for interactive elements: 

Color is a powerful tool for emphasising lesser/greater importance of interface components. Using saturated colors within a selective color theme. You can draw user attention to interactiveelements such as call to action by the amount of gray. more saturated colors have less gray and are richer or brighter and vice versa. 

Apply typographic hierarchy:  Text formnatting is another brick in the wall opf visual hierarchy. Typograohic hierarchy allows for seperating the content you want users to lock on immediately and prior to the rest of the information. The common approach to distinguish text content is to group it according to three levels of importance: 

Lvl 1 is for the most important content and applies to ehadings

Lvl 2 usually applies to subheadings that hlp users navigate to diufferent parts of design, grouping related information together

lvl 3 is used for body text - article, description, or note. 

 Choose typeface styles and categories and combine them to achieve contrast: 

Think how to support visual hierarchy with typeface styles and categories. The typeface is a family of one or more fonts with common visual features, but with different attricutes which make categories (serif, sans serif, decorative, etc) and styles (italic, bold, etc) 

With differnet typefaces, you can make certain words, phrases, or digits more or less recognizable, and express the overall design mood in another way. one of the ways to achieve typographic hierarchy is to combine text in a sans-serif font with one in a serif font. 

Designers also suggest paring typefaces that look thick and bold with thin typefaces that appear to be smalled. At the same time, these typefaces much have a similar tone or feel to keep the design consistent. eg, use rounded typefaces, stick to letterforms with similar shapes in the o’s, opt for typeface with similar x-heights if the styles will beused in line with one another throughout the project. The x-height is the distanec between the baseline and the meanline of lower-case letters in a typeface. Usually, x-height is the height of the letter x in the font, Henve the term. 

How to test a visual Hierarchy: 

Once you have a mockup, you test it to learn about its strong and weak sides. 

User Testing: 

This testing apporach is about giving a person a task to perform, and see how they proceed. Yhe evaluate the time it took for the user to complete this action. 

Blurring Technique: 

Simplest and fastest way to find out whether you emphasized the right interface elements or not. Take a screenshot of a needed page, open it in Photo Shop and apply a 5-10 px Gaussian blur. If you recognize buttons, a logo, section and other visual elememnt in a page’s blurred version. The visual hierarchy is done correctly. 

A/B testing: 

Entails showing an original page (control) version to half of the traffic, while another visator group is presented with the modified page called variation. pages with minor changes in saturation of a call-to-action button or location of a focal point as well as fully redesigned pages can be used for experiments. Collected feedback data is then analyzed to define which version works better. 

Thoughts:  I really enjoyed reading this article about visual hierarchy and about hoe to  prioritizing design elements to effectively communicate information to users. Reading this article made me realise that it is crucial to align visual emphasis with the goal of a specific page or content. Reading this article also made me realise ideas such as Gestalt principles and Z or F patterns. The user testing blurring technique is also something knew that i discovered reading this article and will give it a try in the future. 

[beatricemarx-selfreflective-blog]

At the very first beginning of my project, I collected many ideas and did a lot of brainstorming to get to my final topic. 

After I collected every raid, assorted it and concretized them I decided to use the topic „Urban Warrior“ literally as my brand name. 

The reason for that is because of the organization problems at the beginning of our trimester. I was afraid that the topic could change one more time or that the rules about the implementation would vary and so I decided to work extra safe with the topic as the actual brand name. In my opinion, this isn‘t very innovative but my project will be absolutely on topic. I didn‘t want to take big risks and risking my grades. 

I wanted to create a Corporate Design for a fictional firm that produces and sells perfumes. One of the reasons I decided to choose the topic perfumes is that I wanted to do some packaging.

My plan for the project was to design the following: 

- Corporate Design/Corporate Identity for the fictional brand „Urban Warrior“ (Logo, Business Cards, Letterhead, Website)

- 4 Fragrances with individual packaging 

- Packaging photo for every fragrance

- Mood Photo for every perfume (with a model)

Corporate Design:

I knew that I wanted some colorful packaging and advertisement, that‘s the reason why the Corporate Design had to be simple and uncomplicated to avoid an overload of impressions. 

The main colors for Firm Identity are black and white. Those colors are very calm but look still expensive and high quality. 

It was important for me, that all of the designs are functional and clean. 

Also, I used many bold outlines or squares in my designs (Logo, Website, Letterhead), because I wanted a geometrical element for some diversification.

Logo:

I went for a Logo out of Text with a square around. It still has a high recognition but looks classic, premium and significant.

Without the square, the logo looked a little bit lost and not that expensive.

I will use the Logo both in black on white or white on black.

I also designed a Brand Expansion Sign which I used for instance on the Packaging and my business cards.This will help to clarify products as pieces from my brand without putting the whole logo on it. 

Website:

The plan was to add a lot of color with photos, so I also didn‘t use color for the website. I realized, that 100% black looked very bold and heavy and experimented with the covering and shades of grey. I finally used a covering of 88%.

I designed a landing page you are able to scroll through, out of 3 parts with information about the ingredients, a link for a member card and a link to the perfumes for men and women.

Brand Story:

As the topic is „Urban Warrior“ I thought about a fragrance for kinds of people who like to go on the adventure and live an exciting life.

I didn‘t want to write just the actual ingredients like „blossom“ or „lemon“ on the packaging, but to use some words causing a mood and a picture in the head and describing the type pf personality the perfume is made for.  I got this idea from the brand „Axe“ which produces deodorant and perfume with the smell of „leather and cookies“ or „graffiti and fresh forest“.

I wanted to do two perfumes for men and two for women.

With my fragrances, I wanted to describe 4 different unconventional and modern lifestyles in the city.

First of all, I collected ideas and thought about different lifestyles my perfume could represent and finally imagined one storys for each perfume.

Second, I gave each one a smell. I collected many fragrances for every one and then decided for 2 per perfume.

And third, I associated colors with the story and smell. 

Packaging:

I did a lot of research on how to design perfume packaging and what kind of styles are in trend right now. 

My inspiration for the color gradients were sundowns and the sky. I was not quite sure what kind of colors and gradients to use unless I thought out of my window in the sundown and knew that the best gradients existing come from our nature. 

It was important for me, that the gradients look natural and logically.

Pastel colors and not completely covering tones were my favorite.

I created over 40 gradients with Photoshop.

As the gradients are the main part of my packaging, I had to chose wisely.

The packaging was printed by myself. 

I tried many different types of papers: Glossy, natural, thick, thin, very thick, extra white, recycling paper. Every time I thought I had finally found the perfect sheet, another problem appeared. It was very important that the color wasn‘t fading in the paper and that the color won‘t break off during the folding process. It was also important for me to do many test prints because it is the best way for me to correct the packaging for the customer‘s benefit because on the printed version it looks often a bit different than on the computer screen. 

I tried many different types of paper and decided to go for a 140g extra white.

I decided to keep the front simple, clean and minimalistic. The bright colors should dominate the whole packaging. I wanted them to create a mood which describes the smell of the perfume on the other way. 

When you do packaging it is important to chose the right colors. They all have a psychological effect, describe the smell and it it obvious that you buy either a pretty product than an ugly one. 

First, I designed the front of the packaging and tried many variations. I decided to make them all similar except for the color variation. 

The only two fonts I used were the Brand Typeface „Amplitude Comp“ and the „Helvetica Neue“ for the ingredients on the backside because it was hard to read the small text with the brand typeface because of the hight. 

Advertising:

Every brand needs some advertisement. I wanted to do 2 posters per fragrance.

For every perfume, I took 3 different types of photos.

First, a standard photo of the packaging and the flacon just showing the actual product. 

Second, also a packaging photo but in an environment where the perfume belongs to. 

And at least a mood-photo with a model and without the packaging, describing the vibe and smell of the perfume within the picture. I wanted one specific person representing the group of people my perfume is made for. 

I collected many ideas for every fragrance and did a lot of scribbles.

[mokotechnologyltd]

The manufacturing of PCB Milling Boards

PCB Milling boards

Boards (circuits boards, printed circuit boards, …) can be manufactured in many ways, in this article, there’re two PCB milling ways we would like to introduce. The first way goes like this:

• Making a movie • Exposure of the photosensitive base material • Develop • Etching • Drilling • Decoating • Coating with soldering varnish

PCB Insulation milling

The second way of PCB manufacturing-PCB milling, which at first seems more attractive, is insulation milling. This requires the following steps:

• Generating the milling data, preferably as G-code according to DIN 66025 • Clamping the base material • Milling the contours of the conductor tracks • Drilling the holes for the components in the same clamping • Coating with soldering varnish

The following points speak for the insulation milling:

• The basic PCB material is cheaper • The panic with chemicals falls away • The production of a single PCB prototype is faster

On the other hand, it speaks against:

• You need an appallingly expensive CNC milling machine, along with the necessary control electronics and PCB software. Nothing should go below 2,000,- Euro total costs, even in self-construction. As a PCB manufacturer in China since 2006, MOKO Technology manufactures PCB with advanced CNC milling machines to assure good quality • Expensive carbide cutters are required for milling, which usually last only 1 – 2 European boards • Creating the milling data is not easy • Setting the PCB milling parameters is difficult and usually only works with trial and error • Milling a one-sided European board can take more than an hour • The milling dust (glass fibers!) may be harmful to health

PCB manufacturing procedure

If you still want to mill your printed circuit boards, here is the procedure you can use to produce the board shown above with the dimensions 100 mm x 60 mm. This is the control board of the spindle motor of the milling machine. The board is only one-sided, but the production of double-sided boards is possible according to the same process. It is important that a trace width can be created, which makes it possible to perform a trace between two IC connections. Otherwise, only very simple boards can be milled. The fact that it can be successful in this shows the following cut-out enlargement:

The trace width should be around 0.3 mm, the distance between the traces and soldering eyes about 0.4 mm. This means that the PCB board can also be soldered sensibly without constantly soldering traces with each other. However, this requires a decent soldering iron with a thin, long tip and good soldering wire (0.5 mm).

The software pcb-gcode

Without appropriate software, of course, nothing works. You can use the layout software Eagle to design the printed circuit boards, of course, if you find MOKO Technology, you can get PCB design as free with your PCB manufacturing need. Eagle has a freeware version for trying out and for smaller projects. This is also interesting for people who use a different layout program, as we will see later.

However, creating PCB milling programs for insulation milling is not a standard function of Eagle. But because it is possible to have such functions carried out by so-called “ULPs” (User Language Programs), a man named John Johnson has earned himself to write a suitable ULP.

The ULP can be downloaded from the CadSoft download page. First, look for the “PCB-gcode.zip” ULP. Unfortunately, there is no search function, but the ULPs are sorted alphabetically. Download the zip file and unzip all the files it contains to the c:-programs-EAGLE-4.12-ulp directory.

Now, if you type “run pcb-gcode -setup” in Eagle’s layout view on the command line, the following configuration screen should appear:

Here you set the following parameters:

1.Top Side (top of the PCB board, side of the component)

• Generate top outlines – Generate PCB milling data for the conductor tracks of the top • Generate top drills – Create drilling data for the top • Generate top fills – Create milling data to remove all copper between traces and soldering eyes (usually not required)

2.PCB Bottom Side (bottom of the board)

• How the parameters of the top

3.PCB Board (parameters that apply to the entire board)

• Generate Milling – generates milling data from the mill layer of the board (e.g. outline or larger cutouts) • Isolation Default – this should be a very small value, 0.0025 is OK • Isolation Maximum – the maximum width of the insulation • Isolation Step Size – how much wider the insulation becomes with each pass

4.CB Units (units of measure)

• Microns – thousandths of a millimeter • Millimeters – millimeters • Mils – Thousandths of An inch • Inches – inches (25.4 mm)

Then click on the “Machine” tab. The following window appears:

Here you set the following parameters:

5.Z-Axis (Z-Axis settings)

• Z High – A position that avoids collisions with clamping devices • Z Up — The position on which the Z-axis is driven over the board when positioning in a hurry. Should not be chosen too high to save time • Z Down – Intrusion depth of the cutter • Drill Depth, slightly more than the thickness of the printed circuit board • Drill Dwell – Bore time • Milling Depth – PCB Milling depth for outlines and cut-outs, slightly more than the thickness of the board

6.Tool Change

• Position on which the Z-axis is driven for convenient tool change

Spindle (milling spindle)

• Spin Up Time – Time in seconds to keep the spindle at speed • Etching Tool Size – Width of the engraving stitch for milling the trace outlines (see below)

7.Feed Rates

• XY – Feed speed for the X and Y axes during PCB milling • Z – Immersion speed of the cutter

Then click on the “GCode Style” tab. The following window appears:

Here you can now set for which PC control program the code should be generated. This is what a so-called “post processor” (.pp) does. As a fan of Mach3, I chose “Mach”. If there is no post-processor for the control program you are using, you can create one yourself by doing the following:

• Choose the post-processor that comes closest to the desired one • Then open the gcode-defaults.h file in the directory C:-Programs-EAGLE-4.12-up with the editor • Make the necessary changes • Do not change the format codes such as “%f”, “%d”, etc. • Save the file under a new name, e.g. “Cover.pp”

Then, when you click Accept, the configuration changes are saved. Clicking “Accept and make my board” saves the configuration changes and starts generating the milling and drilling data. Clicking “Cancel” discards all changes.

Generating PCB milling and drilling data in Eagle

Generating the data from Eagle is very easy, but some detail needs to be considered to create a usable circuit board. First, you should set the “Design Rules”. To do this, enter “DRC” on the command line or click on the corresponding icon. The design rules window appears.

First, click on the “Clearance” tab and set all distances to 16mil (0.4 mm). This is, first of all, a good starting point for your own experiments. Then click on the “Sizes” tab.

Set the minimum track width to 16mil (0.4 mm). This is important when working with the Autorouter. Then click on “Restring”.

Set the pads (component connectors) to 16mil. This ensures that they do not become too small. All values are those with which I work and with which I have achieved good results. Of course, you may be able to achieve better results with other values.

Then click “Check”. You will probably get a list of errors that complains of too few distances between the traces. Change the spacing accordingly. However, you can ignore too few distances where traces are performed between IC ports. They should not make the traces narrower there either.

If everything is fine, type “run pcb-gcode” on the command line

The following files are then generated, all of which have the name of your schematic file, to which the following extensions are attached:

• top.nc: the trace outlines for the top of the board • bot.nc: the trace outlines for the bottom of the board • tf.nc: Milling data to remove the remaining copper on the top (usually not necessary) • bf.nc: Milling data to remove the remaining copper on the bottom (usually not necessary) • td.nc: Drilling data, seen from the top. In the beginning there is a table with the required drill diameters. Due to the conversion inch millimeters with partly “crunch” values. Just take the drill that comes closest.

These are to be used in the production of one-sided boards, otherwise, the board would have to be turned over. mt.nc: Milling data for outlines and cutouts, seen from the top. mb.nc: Milling data for outlines and cutouts, seen from the bottom.

These files are written to the same directory as your schematic file.

For a first test, you can now open the top.nc or bot.nc in Mach3 and view the result. Presumably, the display of the milling webs is outside the preview window. Therefore, reduce the size of the display until you see the board. Then move and move them until you have a clear picture:

Click on the image to see it in full size and check the outlines of the traces and component connectors. Particularly critical are the places where traces are carried out between component connections. If there is no milling track between the conductor track and the connection, then you must reduce the width of the milling stitch in the configuration (Etching Tool Size).

Clamping the board

To be able to mill the board, you must first clamp it. It makes a significant difference whether you work with an engraving depth controller or not. The engraving depth controller ensures that the PCB milling stitch always has the same immersion depth at all points of the board. Because the Stichel is V-shaped, the depth determines the width of the insulation, i.e. the milled web. If this becomes too wide, then your traces disappear into the nirvana, it becomes too narrow, copper stops and leads to short circuits. The depth controller on my machine looks like this:

The short pipe at the front is the connection for the vacuum cleaner, the micrometer screw is used for height adjustment. I will describe how the depth controller works and is built elsewhere.

Because the engraving depth controller presses the board firmly on the underlay, it does not need to be secured against lift-off. Instead, it is important to secure the board against slipping. For this purpose, I have built a frame consisting of 1.0 mm rigid aluminum sheets on a wooden plate.

Two sheet metal strips form an angle into which the board is pressed by two wedges of the same material. The image should make the principle understandable. This type of fastening has the advantage for series production that the boards are always clamped in the same position. So I can first mill all the boards and drill them in one pass without having to constantly change the program and the tool.

The PCB milling tool

You can use engraving stitches for milling, which are parts made of carbide round rods, in which half is ground away in the lower area. These are then sanded at different tip angles. The grinding angle is always half the size of the tip angle. The tip is slightly sanded, resulting in a cutting edge. Cutting width and tip angle can be selected when ordering. So far, I have achieved the best results with 0.1 mm cutting width, a tip angle of 40° and a milling depth of 0.2 mm. The drawing shows a trick:

The shaft diameter should be 3 mm, which also fits with Proxxon collets. There are also stitches with 1/8 inch shaft diameter, which do not fit properly into the 3.2 mm collet and tend to “egg”. Take a look at eBay, there are several vendors. Make sure that you get stitches with a finished cut edge, you have to grind stitches without cutting with a stitch grinding machine yourself.

Workpiece zero point

The workpiece zero points is located on the left front edge of the PCB board in the milling data for the top. At the bottom, however, it is located on the right, front edge. All coordinate values of the X-axis are negative!

Height

If you work with an engraving depth slider, you know how to adjust the height. Otherwise, the easiest way is to clamp a cutter and drive it over the board for a short time. Then loosen the chuck and drop the cutter onto the board. Then tighten the feed again and set the Z-axis to zero. Don’t forget to drive the Z-axis up a bit again!

Immersion depth

The immersion depth is very critical because this results in the width of the PCB milling web. The formula for this is:

Cutter 40°: Width = Immersion Depth * 0.7279 Cutter 60°: Width = Immersion Depth * 1,1547

You need a certain minimum immersion depth (0.15 – 0.2 mm in my experience), otherwise, a ridge will be created at the milled webs. Since inaccuracies of the machine also play a role, I advise trying some of the pieces of waste.

Spindle speed

The speed of the milling spindle should be as high as possible in order to achieve a burr-free cut. Spindle speeds from 20,000 rpm are OK. However, on my machine with 6,000 rpm also quite clean boards are available.

Milling

Now it’s time to start! Also pay attention to the necessary safety distance of the cutter and that there are no clamping means in the way. Don’t forget to turn on the spindle! You probably won’t be satisfied with the first result and will have to experiment a bit.

Drilling

One of the charms of the process is that you can drill the board immediately. To do this, you need the drilling data on the respective page. The holes go through the whole board in any case but are mirror-image at the bottom to the top, i.e. also with the drilling data the zero points of the bottom is the right front. As soon as a drill change is required, the PCB milling program stops and moves the spindle to the position you specified for the tool change.

Double sided PCB

As already mentioned, the production of double-sided boards is also possible. To do this, place a separate, small hole in the layout of the board and note the coordinates. To do this, enter “info” on the command line and click on the hole. You will then see a small window

The first coordinate (52.07) is the X-axis, the second is the Y-axis, seen from the top. If you turned the board after milling and drilling the top, position the center of the milling spindle exactly over this hole and enter the coordinate values as the X and Y positions in the controller. You have to enter the X-coordinate as a negative value!

Other PCB layout programs

If you are working with a different layout program, you can read the Gerber and Exelon data using the Eagle Power Tools and then generate the milling data from it, and as per a PCB manufacturer that you can trust, MOKO Technology can be a good choice as we’re professional in manufacturing and assembling printed circuit boards since 2006, we’re also open to answer any of your questions on the issues of your PCB boards!

[mrrolandtfranco]

How-To: United States of Craigslist, Chalkboard Style!

Ah the trusty old, well-worn, United States of [Thiessen Polygon] Map. But at least I was a relatively early adopter (the original version was made in…yikes!…2011). Sure, this post will show you how to make these boundaries, but more interestingly, it will show you how to make a chalkboard-style map! Now pay attention or teacher will rap your knuckles with a ruler.

There are only a couple key tricks to getting the chalkboard style rolling. The first is using a nice seamless chalkboard texture. The second is in hacking that stippled chalky line style. Here are some resources to get us going…

Data & Resources

A Geocoded table of Craigslist Sites (an Excel file of places, site URLs, and their coordinates) More than meets the eye. Tons of Craigslist sites are combinations of named places (“saginaw-midland-baycity”), generic places that imply specific places (“mendocino county”), and geographically broad generic places (“northeast SD”). So there was lots of manual placing, and heaps of site-duplication to represent the shotgun pattern of multi-city sites.

The United States of Craigslist (link to polygon shapefile download page) You are welcome! This represents lots of dissolving (for multi-location sites), and manual crafting (so orphaned peninsulas actually get assigned to the most drive-able site). I’ll show you how it was made, but in the meantime just cheat and download the results.

Chalkboard Image Assets (a zip with two PNG images) This is the green chalkboard texture used for the background. It’s not easy making a texture image that repeats without obvious edge patterns. This will save you lots of time! Also included is the over-the-top-skeuomorphic image overlay with cute little pieces of chalk and dusty corners, etc. Just adorable.

Ok, time to start dragging our fingernails down this map…

How These States Got Their Shapes

If you’ve ever read this book, or watched this show, you are keenly aware that the United States were carved out in a surprisingly arbitrary, and sometimes accidental, fashion. Let’s take a crack at generating some new states, based on pragmatic economic zones.

I went to Craigslist’s sites page, and copied all the sites for the United States, dropped them into an Excel table (splitting up all the multi-city sites) and geocoded them. While Craigslist shows their own point-map of sites, we need to be more specific, since we’re turning them into polygons.

I added them to ArcGIS as XY events. I marvel at the goodness of visualization every time a table is accribitzed into a map. Fortunately for me, a cartographer, this means I marvel a lot.

Now for some whiz-bang polygon generation! I used the “generate Thiessen polygons” tool. Thiessen (or “Voronoi” to non-map people) polygons divvy up areas that are considered the closest to a seed point, before getting closer to another seed point. In real life, there are lots of practical conditions that would alter these, like natural barriers or road network conditions, etc. But they’ll do for now.

Speaking of natural barriers, the Thiessen polygons stretch out into the oceans. Let’s pull in a shape of the US land and have a look.

Using a “clip” tool, we can chop off the parts of the polygons that don’t intersect land. Like a cookie cutter. Don’t worry, Alaskans and Hawaiians, I’ve included you too, you just don’t play well for screen-captures.

Remember those pesky sites that had multiple places in their name (akron/canton, dallas/ftworth, etc.)? So far, we have a zone for each named place in a craigslist site. The orange lines represent the within-site divisions that we’ll have to dissolve.

Running a “dissolve by attribute” merges the geometry of same-named sites. Now we have some slightly weird, but more truthy, polygons.

Chalkboard Styling

Let’s style this sucker up! Did you know that you don’t have to use a solid color to fill polygons? You can use a hatched pattern (fun), a gradient (use judiciously), or a picture. Since I want the map to look as much like a chalkboard as possible, a simple black or slate colored background won’t cut it. I’ve made a chalkboard texture image to fill my background shapes. Beware, lots of green from here on.

I have a shapefile of continents, and a shapefile of oceans, which happen to combine to fill the screen. You can use whatever file you want, as long as it covers your whole view. Using the chalky image as the picture fill for these polygons gives us a nice chalkboard-looking “basemap.”

In the Layout, you could alternatively just add a rectangle and use this image as a picture fill. Whatever’s easier for you.

Now, to bring in the Craigslist states. But how to make them look like they were drawn with chalk? To me, chalk lines have a chunky, stippled, look from one material being scraped over another material.

If I give the stroke a dashed effect, then randomize the dash-iness (a series of numbers telling the map how many pixels to draw and skip and draw and skip), it has a sort of chalk-like feel. Then if I do the same thing for a second version of the lines, but with a thicker and more transparent stroke, they combine into something that looks pretty good!

Here’s what I used (but, it’s like, random, so feel free to type out your own set of numbers):

Thin Line 2pt, #FFFFFF, 40% transparent Dash template: 4 3 1 6 1 4 8 1 2 3

Thick line 5pt, #FFFFFF, 80% transparent Dash template: 3 2 4 5 2 3 2 5 4

Here’s a closer look at my hack chalk lines…

Time for some United States of Craigslist labeling. I’m using the site name. I chose one of the chalky outline layers, and I turned labeling on. You can monkey with specific details like letter spacing, placement properties, arcing along latitudes, etc. But here the chalk-specific things: Font, color, and effect.

I spent about three minutes looking at script-style fonts on my machine and found MV Boli to be fine. It looks an awful lot like Comic Sans, which I find to be cheeky, but it’s not, so I’m shielded from specific scorn by a technicality. Anyway, it looks reasonably hand-scrawled (I pushed it to all caps).

A pastel color (lighter than you may be thinking) helps convey chalk. I used #BEFFE8 with a transparency of 30%. Then I applied the same color as an outline but with a 70% transparency. This helps with that fuzzy irregular edgedness of chalk.

Since I’m proposing a radical, blood-soaked, re-thinking of states and re-drawing of their borders, it is helpful to draw in the current state boundaries for some context. I picked a similarly pastel-ish chalk color of #FFBEBE. Like my other lines, I applied a somewhat random dash pattern and made a version that is thinner and slightly transparent, and a version that is thicker and more transparent. There. States.

Craigslist states, and real states.

Chalkboard Layout

Ok, time to fine-tune some of the layout and design elements of this thing. I’ve inserted a new layout and added my map. I also made an Alaska version and a Hawaii version in separate map views (just copy/paste the layers) so I can add them to the layout as insets.

Whew. All that geography stuff out of the way. Now it’s time to lob delicious skeuomorphic clutter all over this thing!

In a graphic design tool, I made an image overlay to fit on top of my layout so that its full chalkboard potential could be realized. It includes some vignetting, leftover chalk dust in the corner that never gets fully erased, and of course a fine wooden tray to hold the chalk and eraser.

Yes!

Always sign your work.

Then I dropped in a title image, and we have it! A chalkboard map of the United States of Craigslist. Good times.

Happy Chalkboard Mapping! John

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