3 replies to this topic

[dvd mccutcheon]

As a favour to a friend I have revamped a map of a local music festival site, for inclusion in the programme.

See here for the feel of the event.

Just a cheap and cheerful solution - knocked it up in a couple of hours in Illustrator. Needs to be B/W.

I'm mostly OK with it, except for the River fill, which has an "Inner Glow". I find that effect hard to control and cumbersome.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks,

Attached Files

•  riverside_map.pdf   913.32K   197 downloads

[Esther Mandeno]

You guys are so awesome, it looks good to me. I don't really like the 'glow' in the river, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'glow'. The only thing I saw that tripped me up was that I thought the river was some sort of road first until I saw the label at the bottom. I would either label the river closer to the action, or switch the road/river colors? Not sure...

Otherwise, looks clean and informative.

[BioGeoMan]

David,

Thanks for posting, a few thoughts:

• The map area (meaning everything but the legend and title) could be enlarged significantly, I am having a hard time reading the symbols.
• Maybe format the page landscape to mirror the shape of the mapped features and to make best use of space.
• Do not overlay annotation and map features, you have plenty of room.
• I am assuming Watery Lane is a dirt road since it is dashed, but not sure since there is no symbology in your legend.
• Is it supposed to be "Site Plan 2010"? or does 2100 mean something else?
• Is the black and white dashed line at the bottom a rail line?

Hope this helps.

M.

[AndyM]

Hi David,

Thanks for sharing this.

I agree with the other comments. It took me a while to figure out which lines were the river -- but I'm sure if I was using the map on-site I'd figure it out pretty quickly! If you're not happy with the river, you could use some artistic license and vary the width to give it an "organic" look.

One thing I'd look at is the size of the legend. It's a lot of work right now -- a lot of eye movement back and forth from legend to map. If you were to enlarge the map slightly (BioMan's first two thoughts) you might instead be able to label many of those features directly. Any symbol that only appears a couple of time would be a candidate.

Failing that, perhaps you could divide the legend into a few groups of similar features. This would help the user to "learn" the map more quickly.

One final thing: I would try darkening the point symbols to bring them to the foreground -- they are the most important symbols on the map.

All that said, I'd be happy to use this map as it is!

Andy