Proportional Symbol Mapping

This week in Cartography we learned about proportional symbol mapping.  This is basically the idea of presenting a symbol (as simple as a circle or something more representative, like a bottle) that is scaled in a manner that reflects scale to the user. The first map above was created entirely in ArcMap.  It is not much to look at, but it was quick and fairly simple to create.  The symbols are scaled to the cube root of the actual value, which allows us to see a value for every country.  I also applied a halo effect to the labels to make them a little easier to see.  I'm not sure why ArcMap insists on labeling islands within a country individually (see Greece Greece Greece for example).

I'm happier with this map created in Illustrator, though it would be a lie to say that I am happier with Illustrator.  Illustrator does allow for some powerful "post processing" of a map.  In this case, marrying the partially transparent circles (wine colored!) with a bottle gif and circular text for good measure.  But Illustrator comes at a cost. It seems unnaturally difficult to make simple color choices for example. The big challenge with proportional symbols seems to be finding the sweet spot where the max value looks appropriately "max" but the smallest values are not lost visually.  In this case, Luxembourg was the real challenge as tried to find a size that eliminated some of the crowding but not so much to lose Luxembourg entirely.  At the same time, the circular text often collided with the country borders in the background.  In the end, I also applied a halo-like effect to the "Belgium" text to prevent it from getting too entangled with the coastal border.