Michigan’s Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

This map was produced completely within ArcGIS Pro, designed for distribution at Michigan highway rest areas for tourists and travelers in electric vehicles to help locate publicly available electric vehicle charging stations.

The map is focused on public level 3 Fast charging stations that are open 24 hours.

The map offers a great benefit over typical web locating services by showing where the fast charging stations are on a map of Michigan, and classifies them into three groups so customers can quickly relate at-a-glance to wherever their best charging options might be at any given moment.

This helps a customer who still needs to use other web services to located the station exactly, but eliminates additional clicking and data entry to the typical web-based charging station locators, especially for a customer who is driving, and who may be relying on a less tech-savvy rider to find their next station.

Design Goal

Establish a visual hierarchy emphasizing point locations of the fastest electric vehicle charging stations in Michigan. The project imagines a tourist, having stopped at any rest area, finding a paper map provided by the state that orients them geographically to fast charging stations, and free-for-the-taking as a future reference while they travel througout Michigan.

Other considerations were to design a basemap style that might suit itself to a series of similar maps, with different topics i.e. trails-by-type, public facility locations, etc.

Typestyle Choices

Gill Sans MT for electric vehicle charging stations

Use of Color

In Symbols – Nominal scheme, orange for electric vehicle charging stations.

In Typography – Black with white halos

Color Blindness considerations – Symbols use distinctive, black circles and graphic shapes as their primary identifiers. Color is supportive, but less important. Anyone with color-blindness will be able to leverage the graphic shapes to interpret the map

Use of Symbols – Graphic and Typographic

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations – standard vehicle starting symbol in ArcGIS Pro