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Lab 5: Creating a map with an NPS (National Park Service) style

In this lab, you'll create a map of any location you'd like using the style of an NPS map (NOTE: Consider using a location your bus travels through - then you can take advantage of the work you've already done, and potentially use the work for this lab in your project). You'll learn a few new tools, but mostly this lab is about practicing your Illustrator skills and learning how to create a map of your own that looks great by using the style you find in a professionally-designed map.

Here's an EXAMPLE:

I started with a Google Map of Green Lake:

Google Green Lake map

I traced the elements and gave them visual appearance of this map:

San Juan Island NHP map

Here's my result:

finished map

Before and after:

Google Green Lake map finished map

Step 1: Create your models

a. Create a new Illustrator file called " ParkStyleMap.ai."

a. Go to http://maps.google.com and find a location of interest (with about the same level of detail you see in the Green Lake map).

Ideas: a location in a city you'd like to visit, your home town, your current neighborhood, some random place you've never heard of before but looks interesting on a map.

b. Make a screenshot and paste it into an Illustrator file.

c. Name that layer "model" and lock it.

Step 2: Draw the map

Here is the NPS map that will act as the style model (it's a pdf file).

a. Paste a copy of this small screenshot onto your Illustrator file to use for copying colors with the eye-dropper tool.

b. Look closely at the map and notice how features are treated visually (e.g. notice how minor roads are drawn differently than major roads or trails, notice how roads are labeled, notice that bodies of water have a border around them etc...).

c. Start with one visual feature (probably the major background area), create a layer and draw this feature by tracing your model, then using the eye-dropper tool to get the color just right.

d. Hide this layer so it doesn't get in the way, then move on to another feature (perhaps major roads).

Here are two videos that show you how to deal with some situations you'll probably encounter:

d. Continue until you've included all of the features you want to include in your final map. You may find that some features in your map don't correspond to features in the map model or that they don't look quite right in your situation. In that case, use your judgment to come up with a visual treatment that feels consistent with the model. Here is an example of what I did in one such case:

I started by making the major roads black (on one layer), and the minor roads gray (on a second layer), like in the NPS map. Because there are so many roads on this map, that looked overwhelming:

step 1

So I made them all gray:

step 2

e. Add a title, a key, a North arrow and a scale.

FINAL PRODUCT: ParkStyleMap.ai

SUMMARY

text on a line: video

scissors tool (cutting out portions of a line) video