Dot Dot Goose! Dot Mapping Southern Florida

Despite what you may be thinking, dot mapping is not a game of connect the dots to make a map.  Dot mapping, in fact, is a way to display conceptual data what is not uniform throughout a given area.  It allows us to to visualize patterns that may occur in the data.  So how does one come up with a schema for using the dots?  Well, in the map below we use dots to represent a set number of people.  In our case, dots equal 10,000 people on the map.  I also bound the dots to only occur within urbanized zones because it doesn't make much sense to see a dot of 10k people in the middle of Lake Okeechobee does it?  So here is the map and I will later discuss how I made it:

So the map in general was pretty easy to make....once I got past ArcGIS constantly crashing.  So here are the steps I took to make it:

1. The majority of the work took place in ArcGIS with some final polishing in Adobe Illustrator.  
2. First I added the south Florida shapefile to my TOC.
3. Next the population data spreadsheet was added to the TOC and then joined to the Florida shapefile.  This allowed me to access the population data I needed to create the dot map you see above.
4. The next step was to create the dot symbology for the map.  This was done in the symbology tab for the Florida shapefile's property window.  Under the Quantities section, Dot density was selected and the Population field was used to create the Dot Map.
5. The Dot Value was set to 10,000 and the Dot Size was set to 2.6.  This took many iterations to figure out what seemed to look best.  
6. Next, other map layers (water and urban) were added along with the essential map elements.  
7. The water layer ended up causing multiple crashes of ArcGIS.  To combat this I turned the Dot layer into its own map file and kept the rest on the original map file.  
8. With both map files ready, I exported them both to a .AI (Adobe Illustrator) format.  Later I would merge these two in Illustrator to finalize the map.  
9. From here work shifted to Illustrator.  Both maps were merged by copying the dot layer and then using a paste-in-place function on the other layers.  This worked out great as you can see above.  
10. The final pieces to this map were creating the legend and adding a simple drop shadow to the map.  

And there you have it.  I hope you enjoyed the map.  What do you think and how else could I have applied the dot size and values to make this map even better?  Let me know in the comments below!