Typography and Labeling of the San Francisco Bay Area

For this week's exercise, we were tasked with labeling various features in the San Francisco Bay area. Below is the map I created:

I chose Sitka font for this project because I felt like a serif font helped me read smaller type. For each respective category, I changed the font size from large to small depending on the relative size of the object being labeled within each category.  For example, when labeling the water features, I used the largest font on the Pacific Ocean, the next largest for the San Francisco Bay, and so on.  I used this same philosophy when naming all of the general features with the largest being San Francisco, Marin Peninsula, and so on.  I created a visual hierarchy by separating each category of feature by at least 2 font sizes with the water and general features. 

I used 8-point font on all parks and topographic names and 10-point font size for the Golden Gate Bridge.  I placed most every label on top of the respective feature and used halos or shadows with different colors to represent the various categories.  This helped each font stand out amongst a busy background. I used a white halo for the general category, a green halo for parks, and a yellow shadow for the geographic features.  I did not use a halo for the water features or the Golden Gate Bridge. I did use Italic font for the water features, however. I also used a callout for Lake Merced and the Golden Gate Bridge.