What started off as an experimentation and modification of your standard urban area/street map slowly developed into more of a thematic map. The more I worked on this map, the more I found myself slowly taking things away. But I soon found myself wanting to add things to replace the lost elements and convey a little more information than a simple metropolitan area map.
I continued to tweak the map by adding and removing features but removing any more of the roads suddenly made for a very empty feeling map. I compensated by adding locations for more technology company headquarters, but that soon cluttered the map in a different way. Complicating matters even further is the fact that many companies are densely concentrated in several areas, making it near impossible to show what is where without creating several insets.
One thing I'm definitely not happy about is how ArcMap is unable to properly anti-alias vector graphics (or for the most part, any graphics in general used within the program.) The poor aliasing results in many overly jagged edges which challenges readability and makes the corporate logos look somewhat amateurish--even though I employed only high quality vector originals for the logos to begin with. The end result would've looked much better had I used Photoshop, but I restricted myself to ArcMap for the final output. It's just disappointing that ArcMap falls short with small but significant issues such as aliasing and difficulty in defining one's own color gradients (as far as I could tell, one would have to employ programming knowledge in the form of VBscript or C++ to do something as simple as defining your own color ramp,) but I digress.
I ended up with the above map as a compromise of what I feel is an adequate 'feel' of urban-ness while retaining what I feel are the largest and/or most influential companies in the area. Perhaps with more time, the inset idea may have come to fruition.
