I want to be sure you walk away from this class able to wow people by throwing together a quick and good-looking map. In this lab, you'll practice by modifying an existing, professionally produced map.
Here is what you'll be doing:
Starting with this:
And creating this:
The National Park Service produces beautiful maps for every NPS site. And since they're a federal agency, all of these maps are in the public domain (i.e. not copyrighted). They provide the maps both as pdf files and as Illustrator files.
Step 1: Download & analyze the map
a. Download the map and double-click on the file name to unzip it
b. Open the map in Illustrator - you may get some error messages because it's looking for fonts and files that are missing. Dismiss the messages - it should open just fine and look like this:
c. Try hiding/revealing different layers to see how the creator of this map has organized them. For example, this is what you'll see if you hide the "relief" layer:
d. Make all of the layers visible and zoom in to about 150% magnification and spend some time thinking about the visual qualities of the map. You can assume the cartographer who created this map made careful decisions about what features to include, where to place labels, what color to make them etc... One of the skills you'll want to develop to create effective visuals, is the ability to see what what choices have been made by other designers and imagine why.
Pre-attentive Processing
This is one of the most powerful aspects of vision and one you'll want to take advantage of with your visuals - there are some things that we can see immediately without even looking for them. That is because they are processed "pre-attentively" meaning that your visual system registers them before you even start to consciously think about what you're seeing.
Look at the image below and try to spot the yellow highlighted letters. Now try to spot every letter "s". One uses pre-attentive processing - you can't help but see it. The other is not processed pre-attentively so you have to consciously look for them one at a time.
When you're creating a visual, you want important elements and patterns to be pre-attentive so they pop out for viewers the moment they glance at them. Look back at the map and notice which features are easy to spot and which you have to look for more closely.
Layering
Layering is related to pre-attentive processing. Good layering means that elements in a visual are easy to spot separately, even if they overlap or are very close to each other. For example, it's easy to see all of the trails on this map, and it's also quite easy to see all of the state lines even though they're much more subtle and even though the trail lines overlap them - the map is doing a good job of "layering". That is, it's making it easy for your eye to separate the categories of elements from each other.
Layering is mostly possible because of the fact that some visual properties are processed pre-attentively, but it's enhanced by the fact that once you consciously know what you're looking for, your brain can actually prime certain visual receptors to make it easier to spot the given visual element you're looking for (e.g. "the small green blob shapes" or the "thick lines").
When you as a designer make a group of elements alike and make sure that all other elements are different, you are creating good layering.
b. Here's another important question to ask:
Visual Hierarchy
When you make the most important elements prominent and less important elements less prominent, you are creating visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy helps the viewer know where to look first. If everthing is just as prominent as everything else, you have no visual hierarchy and as a result, it feels too busy to the user because they don't intuitively know where to look first. You can take a busy-looking visual and make it seem clean and easy to view by improving the visual hierarchy without removing anything.
The key to making elements prominent is making them contrast strongly with other things (make them darker/lighter, larger/smaller, a distinctive color etc).
Look at the California Trails map and ask yourself what you notice first. Then ask what you notice second, third, etc... What do you not really even notice even though it's there and perfectly legible (but just not grabbing your attention)? Notice that elements are distinctive from each other (e.g. trail name labels versus place name labels).
Difference means difference
This may seem like a trivial point, but it's important to remember. When a viewer looks at your graphic, she or he will unconsciously assume that things that are different colors or sizes represent different things. And they'll expect things that are the same color and size to represent similar things. If they don't (for example, if some towns are labeled with an italic font while others are labeled with a regular font, or if the rivers are labeled the same way as the towns), they'll be confused.
Step 2: Modify the map for a different audience/purpose
Another thing to analyze in a visual is what audience it is intended for.
Who do you think this map is for? Is it for children? Is it for historians? Is it for people who need to know which turn to take at the next intersection? Is it for people sitting at home contemplating a trip? Is it for people doing homework for school? I'm just prompting you to imagine parameters of the audience...come up with more questions for yourself. And ask "why do I answer yes or no to each of these questions? What tells me, for example, that this map is probably not intended primarily for children?"
In the next part of this exercise, you will modify the map for a new audience.
a. Save a copy of the map as "MapForOverview.ai". Leave the original so you can go back to it if need be.
b. Unlock all of the layers
c. Make the changes listed below. To find out which layer a given feature is on, just select it and see which layer becomes selected (i.e. highlighted). Then you can click on the circle to the right of the layer name to select everything on that layer and change all of the elements all at once.
d. Select the relief (the image on the "Relief" layer that shows the contours of the land) and convert it to black & white by choosing Edit -> Edit Colors -> Convert to Grayscale
e. Select one of the Cal Trail layers and change the stroke thickness to 4 pt and change the color to green (it doesn't have to be identical to the green I chose).
f. Do the same for the other trail layer
g. Select everything on the "State type 65k" layer and increase the font size until you can read it when the map is zoomed out enough to see it all on your screen
h. Tweak the location of the state names to make them look better (some are overlapping trails or state lines at this point):
The next job is to make the city dots big enough to see them.
i. Select everything on the Town Dots layer.
To make all of the dots bigger at the same time, you'll "transform" them (there are several ways you can transform things - you can move them, you can rotate them, you can skew them you can flip them left-to-right or front-to-back). I find this very useful. I transform things a lot. You can do the same with individual tools, but this lets you be more precise. You can transform them in place using "Transform each" or you can transform them as a group. To see what the difference is, I'll have you try both:
j. Wrong way (go ahead and do this, then be ready to undo it): Choose Object -> Transform -> Scale (or right click and choose Transform -> Scale). Click the Preview button, then enter "400%" in the "Uniform" box. You won't see the results until you click somewhere else in the dialog box so do that and watch what happens. Then click "cancel" (or if you accidentally dismissed the dialog box, go to Edit -> Undo Transform:
It treated the group of dots as a single unit and scaled up the relative placement as well as the size - which moved them to the wrong place. So...
k. Right way: Choose Object -> Transform Each and enter "400%" in both the Horizontal and Vertical boxes.
l. Then click OK:
There are too many dots for this scale. We just want the ones that represent interesting landmarks (i.e. major cities generally).
m. Reveal the "Town labels" layer so you can see what cities these dots represent and delete most of them (retain one or two for each state, perhaps). This can be a bit tedious, but it goes faster if you lock all of the layers except for "Town labels" and "Town dots" and then just drag your cursor across clusters you want to get rid of to select them before hitting delete.
n. Next increase the text size for the remaining towns. I made it green and italic to make it clearly different than the state text. Feel free to play with other options:
FIRST FINAL PRODUCT: MapForOverview.ai
SUMMARY
what we see automatically (before our conscious brain kicks in)
making it easy to look at a set of elements (e.g. all the rivers) while ignoring other elements
helping the viewer know where to start/what's important
making the visual suit the needs of the people it's intended for