Exercise Four - Ann

Reading a Map
Toronto Parks & Trails




This map shown on the right uses many design principles to help the user navigate through the various parks and trails located in the city of Toronto.











At first glance, the viewer may note the use of highlighting with colour to mark out the areas of the city where parks are located. The consistent use of green for this purpose gives the grouping of Toronto area parks a sense of uniform connectedness, even though they may not be physically connected with each other.








Iconic representation is another principle used by these particular map makers. If you look at the legend pictured on the left, it shows that the small, green "GO" icon will be used to denote the location of Go Transit-Rail stations. To the right (down the centre of the picture), you will see a detail shot of this example icon being used on the map. Twice.



The map also uses three-dimensional layering to illustrate the spatial relationships between the various parks, trails, transit, and road systems. You can see this in the last image, where the GO stations are labelled alongside the red TTC system, the green Parks system, and brown Trail system.


I like this map. It's not only consistent in its use of principles within the map itself, but the icons and colours used to represent the various systems within it are consistent with those used outside the map (like the GO & TTC icons, the use of green for parks). These consistencies made the map very easy to read and helpful in the wayfinding of any given Toronto Park or Trail. My only criticism would be weakness of highlighting the various waterways in the city (the colour of blue used does not contrast very much with the rest of the map). If I had purchased this map, it probably means that I'm an outdoorsy, bike-riding type person, and the location and positioning of bodies of water in the city would be of interest to me.