Figure-Ground masking
& Dasymetric mapping

In this exercise, the task was to create two related maps focusing on the urban locality of Malmö in Skåne, Southern Sweden. The extent of the maps needed to correspond to a feature envelope of a 1,500-meter buffer around the locality where a mask would be applied to practice drawing attention away from unimportant elements and toward the area of interest, i.e. the Malmö urban locality. In other words, the maps needed to clearly mark out, or give more weight to, features inside the urban locality. In applying this figure–ground/focal point design pattern, Photoshop had to be utilized to some degree.

The first map needed to be an overview/reference map of infrastructure, land use, and certain service functions in Malmö. The purpose was to display: 

• The central structure of the road network (symbolized/labeled in a logical, hierarchical fashion)

• Land use

• Certain official and other service functions (particularly cinema, library, museum, and civic services such as fire stations, hospitals, and police stations).

The second map had to be a dasymetric map displaying the varying share of foreign-born inhabitants between and within different districts of Malmö. 

A dasymetric map is a type of thematic map that uses additional data (e.g. residential districts) within a larger urban area (e.g. Malmö urban locality) to refine the representation of a specific variable (e.g. foreign-born inhabitants) across the geographic area. Similar to, yet unlike a choropleth map, which displays data within predefined boundaries, a dasymetric map redistributes the data based on actual land use or other relevant criteria. This method results in a more accurate representation of the spatial distribution of the variable, as it takes into account the actual density and distribution of the phenomena being mapped rather than assuming equal distribution across the entire predefined boundaries.

Hence, the display of the share of foreign-born was confined to areas where people are actually known/thought to mainly reside.