5 replies to this topic

[Hans van der Maarel]

Since I haven't really been posting many maps lately (hopefully that will change soon), I thought I'd show you one of my very first 'real' maps. This is, as far as I know, the first map that I produced that was actually printed and used by the general public.

 nijmegen.jpg   561.93K   204 downloads

This is the standard route map used by the city of Nijmegen, showing where their buildings are located in the city. I made this back in January-March of 1998, when I was working as a trainee for the Geo-Information And Surveying department of the City of Nijmegen (location #9 on the map). I was supposed to do this with Microstation and a Microstation-to-EPS convertor (CADPlot or something like that), which was basically a script saying: level 1 - red lines 1 pt wide, level 2 - blue lines 2 pt wide and so on.

So I suggested (and got permission) to give this a try in Illustrator 7 with MAPublisher 3, since I had used that at my previous trainee post, and this is what came out (after many trips up and down to the printer's, sorting out font problems.

As you can see, I had a lot to learn at that point (well, even now I still learn new stuff every other day)

So what do you think?

[mika]

The beast was born.... :-)

[MapMedia]

Well done for a first map. Question is, what would you do differently now? design and work/flow wise
The Invaliden-parkeerplaats is interesting - a direct translation would not work well in the US.

[rudy]

When I was about 8 or 9 I drew my own atlas by hand. It was a notebook with a separate page for each province, coloured and labelled. I'm not sure how much of the world I drew but it was a harbinger of things to come, I suppose. I wish I had held on to it.

The first map I drew that I got paid for I look at now with embarrassment. Sure, it was before I was trained in cartography but really, there was no reason for not using a straight-edge when making the scale bar. Hans - yours looks much, much better than mine!

[Hans van der Maarel]

Well done for a first map. Question is, what would you do differently now? design and work/flow wise
The Invaliden-parkeerplaats is interesting - a direct translation would not work well in the US.

Disabled Parking? I don't see a problem there (It's a single word in Dutch though: invalidenparkeerplaats, the - is only because it's broken up over 2 lines)

Workflow, as far as I can remember it, is pretty much how I like to work still. Pre-process in GIS, get it into Illy/MAPublisher and finish it up.

Design is where I would make some changes. The roads appear very angular, I would probabely try to smooth out the curves a bit. I'd also curve and space the river name. Same thing for text placement. They're all straight, rotated texts, I would try and put some of those on curves too.

I'm not too happy with the color scheme. Can't remember how much artistic freedom I had there though. Instead of showing the building outlines, I might just do the numbers, and add a background to those circles.

Lose the 'old' logo (double-headed eagle), although on the other hand, trying to capitalize on its long history (founded by the Romans as Noviomagus) may not be a bad idea. 'New' logo (bottom) looks much better imho. It's showing the bridge and the river. For the history buffs: that bridge, the General James Gavin Bridge on the top right, is the "Just Far Enough Bridge", the next one at Arnhem was the famous "Bridge Too Far"...

[MapMedia]

Well done for a first map. Question is, what would you do differently now? design and work/flow wise
The Invaliden-parkeerplaats is interesting - a direct translation would not work well in the US.

Disabled Parking?

In the US, the word is Handicapped. I was thinking a direct translation from Dutch would have been Invalid Parking.