I finally got around to updating the map for this quiz, and I hope I was able to give it a sleek new design :)
The previous map had significantly more blocky and less detailed borders on the counties. This made the map itself significantly easier to make, but cities were harder to place. I tried to correct for misplaced cities, but let me know if you see any further mistakes!
Finally, two towns were merged in january of this year, and thus the stats were reset. I am still using 2016 population figures for the time being, so I combined their 2016 population figures to reach 5200 people.
I decided to cut 254 hamlets with a population of less than 100. A lot of these are just groups of farmhouses. The definition of a hamlet is really odd. Fort McMurray is an urban service area, but technically a hamlet. Hamlets are generally small communities with services akin to villages, but also include wealthy urban developments (aka bedroom communities) usually all wealthy homes with no services, or they may be 'summer villages'/lakeside resort areas where people live long term (usually in the north). Some were essentially neighbourhoods that happened to fall outside of their city limits, so I have cut those ones as well.
Despite how condensed the map may look, distances are huge between cities. I live in Lethbridge in the south, and to drive to Taber directly eastbound takes half an hour, even though they touch on the map. Likewise, it takes 1.5 hours to drive to Medicine Hat, 2 hours to Calgary and 5 hours to Edmonton. The reality is that most of Alberta feels extremely open and massive.
Cheers! 9 is pretty good though considering most Canadians could probably score 2 or 3. As for me I knew about 4 of the cities on your Colorado quiz. Gotta up my game haha.
14 ain't too bad. Went to Alberta last summer and it helps being Canadian. Congrats on the grey-box but it seems as though QM misspelled Alberta as "Albert".
Excellent once again! How do you do the dot sizes so perfectly? Whenever I add dot sizes to my map quizzes, they turn out to be either too big or too small.
Thank you! I resize them on Inkscape--but in order to keep the sizes consistent I also keep a Notepad document open where I plan what size will correspond with different populations in advance (for example, I can write that a city of 800 thousand people will have a circle with a radius of 15). It's worth mentioning that none of these city sizes are actually proportional, rather I aim to make them look correct.
Nice! I do something similar but still never get the dot sizes to look nice. I.e. in this quiz I've spent a lot of time trying to get the dot sizes correct, and am still unable to make it look nice
I really liked how it turned out in that quiz, actually! The thing is that we see imperfections in our own maps and projects much easier (I have these thoughts all the time--and I tweak city sizes often when I am feeling indecisive).
The previous map had significantly more blocky and less detailed borders on the counties. This made the map itself significantly easier to make, but cities were harder to place. I tried to correct for misplaced cities, but let me know if you see any further mistakes!
Finally, two towns were merged in january of this year, and thus the stats were reset. I am still using 2016 population figures for the time being, so I combined their 2016 population figures to reach 5200 people.
You should be proud of that map :D