If your map doesn't have good legibility, then it's not going to be as effective of map. What do I mean by that is that if someone can't identify things correctly on your map or it's not obvious what it is that they're looking at, if it's not clear, then it's not legible and then it's going to be less useful. For example here, I've gone with just the default labeling scheme in terms of the typeface and the type size for this map and it's not the worst thing ever. You're seeing that okay you can read it. It's black on a lighter background but it's not the most legible thing and some of them are a little close together and so on. If I just put a white halo around them, it actually increases the legibility a bit. I'm not a super big fan of just using these white halos, but it's sometimes it works well especially if for example if it's on top of say a satellite image but the main point I'm trying to get across here is for example, where we have text crossing the shoreline or some other line work like we have here, we've increased the legibility by using this halo. If I go back, see without that, that tax is completely lost here. You can't really see it because it's not distinguishable from the background. But if I put the halo in, suddenly it is. So, that's one form of legibility is you want to make sure that for the format of the map that you're making, the size, the distance that the text is readable, that someone can see it if they're going to be farther away, you want to make the text bigger. Those things are fairly clear. I hope are fairly obvious. Legibility can relate to symbols as well. If we have something like schools in the city, you can show them this way. And it's funny because I think now with the software it's great that they include these 3-D symbols. They're kind of fun, a little more visually interesting but when you put them on a map at this map scale with this size symbol, we have a low legibility. In other words, it's easy to see that we have these areas where there are overlapping on top of each other and you can't distinguish one school from another very easily and you certainly can't see the base map behind it very easily. So, you might say, well then why don't we just zoom in and then the size of the symbols hasn't changed but now they're spread out more because we've zoomed in. That's known as increasing our map scale and so that would solve the problem. Right. We've now made our map more legible. Well, yeah, we have but that's kind of cheating because we've changed the scale of our map and maybe we want to see more of the city, maybe we're not just making a map of this neighborhood. So, yes, that would be one way to change the legibility is to change the scale but that's not an ideal solution in this situation. So, what if we go back to the scale we had before but we just make the symbol smaller. Yeah, that does work. That helps quite a bit. We're still getting areas though where the symbols are on top of each other, they're kind of mashing together and so we don't really have a great legibility and to be honest in this situation, I feel like yeah, if I only had maybe three or four schools and it was a fairly zoomed in large-scale map, a symbol like that would be kind of fun and interesting but in a map like this, there's too many of them and it just doesn't seem to work very well. What if we just use a simple school symbol like this. That increases legibility. We have a less overlap, there's still a little bit here but not a lot, or maybe just go with some simple circles. Yes, they're not as interesting or fun as a 3-D schoolhouse, but you know what, it's actually simpler and easier for somebody to interpret what they're looking at and see the locations of these schools. Maybe they have to look at the legend to see what the red circles mean but it's a higher legibility. It's easy to look at and honestly sometimes I feel like maybe simplest is best. So, legibility refers to lines, patterns, shapes, colors, they all have to be distinct from one another so that people can distinguish them and if they can't, then you're reducing the amount of information that somebody can extract from your map and makes it less useful. Size is important. So, symbols have to be large enough that they can be identified and as I mentioned, we have to consider viewing distance. So, if it's a larger poster, you want to have larger symbols, larger text. If it's something that's going to be read in a book, that's a few inches away, you can get away with much smaller symbol, smaller text. So, take that into consideration for sure.
