Election 2008

The first map that is displayed is a replica of a New York Times map of the 2008 United States Presidential Election, followed by a map I made making improvements to the original. I did not feel the need to make very many changes due to the fact that I think the original map is quite clear in conveying its message. My first improvement, however, was brightening up the red and blue colors from their originally muted shades in order to emphasize the contrast between the republican and democratic states. I also enlarged the fonts a bit for easier reading and the states of Alaska and Hawaii are bigger too. In addition to this I changed the labels of the states to their official two letter abbreviations for the original map lacked continuity in how each state was labeled--some states had two letter abbreviations while others had their whole name. The final thing that I changed was the position of the legend and inset maps to create more balance within the entire frame.

Again, I did not feel the need to make many improvements on the original map for I found it to be quite good. I especially liked how the bar separating the heading from the map of the Continental United States also doubled as a graph for the number of electoral votes Obama received versus McCain. For the original map visit: http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

Well, today I am thrilled that the Bush regime has finally come to an end and now after this historic election, Barack Obama is our 44th President. CHANGE has finally arrived :)