Design Success and Failure in Relation to Syntactical Guidelines

For this exercise, I found two graphics of waterpark maps.
The first image is a waterpark map of Wichita Falls in Texas. I believe this map shows good syntactical design. It shows a lot of balance, and everything is held together by the border and the "grassy" area. It's very simple and easy to understand, and likely to get the point across.



For my second image, I used a graphic for the map of Splashtown. Although the map itself is somewhat syntactical, it's not a very interesting design to look at. There is a grid set up around it, but it could be very hard to find exactly which part of the grid you are trying to find on the map. The text on the left side put in boxes kind of throws everything off. Also the text in the orange bubble also kind of throws the whole image off.

Overall, the first image has more balance and just seems to be held together better than the second image of the entire brochure.