All posts tagged: tutorial

Tutorial: Adobe Illustrator 2023’s New “Intertwine” Feature

November 27, 2022
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In which I finally make a video tutorial because the amount of screenshots needed to explain this would have been ridiculous. Let me know what you think; there may be more video tutorial content in the future! Pros: Does what it says it will, fairly intuitive to work with. Cons: Messes with your layer structure, any normal layout edits after applying Intertwine are trickier. Overall: Tough to see how it provides a benefit over the […]

Tips on Researching and Mapping Historical Rail Lines Using the Internet

May 3, 2020
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Historical Maps, Tutorials
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In between writing this blog, designing my own maps, and digitally restoring vintage maps, I also like to map out old, forgotten streetcar and electric interurban networks in Google Maps. I mainly do it because I want to compile information from various sources into one place and build my own coherent understanding of the networks that once existed. So far, I’ve done the streetcars and interurbans of Portland, Oregon in 1920; the interurbans of Spokane, […]

Reader Question: Preparing Print-Ready Raster Files from Adobe Illustrator

April 7, 2016
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Question: Hi Cameron, I’m wrapping up a transit map project that I’ll likely print professionally. I was all set to send the printer a PDF until I happened to catch one of your tweets that mentioned using a high-resolution JPEG instead. I’m wondering if you could share your recommended practices for exporting from Illustrator to print-ready JPEG in terms of resolution, color profiles, and the like. The last thing any of us wants is to […]

Quick Project: Amtrak Timetable Redesign

April 15, 2015
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After complaining on Twitter about how I found information in Amtrak’s timetables difficult to decipher, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and do a quick little redesign to prove my point. The brief to myself: it had to contain all the same information, use the same typeface (Frutiger), and fit in the same space as the original. Everything else was fair game, including colours, as the timetables are printed in four-colour brochures. However, […]

On Digitally Restoring Vintage Maps

January 23, 2015
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Historical Maps, Prints Available, Tutorials
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Restoring the vintage transit maps that I'm now selling in my store is a laborious, time-intensive task, but I think that it's definitely worth it in the end. The major task is getting rid of blemishes: age spots, ink smears, tears, creases, dirt, dust, and even hair or other fibres that are between the print and the scanning surface. Here's how I go about things!

Project: 2015 Sydney Festival Route Map

October 23, 2014
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Mash-Up Maps, My Transit Maps
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If you've ever been to Sydney in January, then you'll know that the Sydney Festival is a big deal. Running for almost the entire month, it brings together the very best in the arts from around Australia and the world – music, dance, performance and more. So I was more than a little bit excited when I was commissioned to produce this thematic "route map" of highlighted events, to be used both online and in the Festival's printed program/brochure.

Tutorial: Drawing Complex Highway Interchanges in Illustrator

October 18, 2014
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This is kind of a tangent to my normal tutorials, but I had a surprising number of requests for this after I published my McKinney Avenue Trolley map, so here goes! The first thing to note is that this is not a 100-percent accurate representation of the interchange: this trolley map is not intended to be a road map or to be used to navigate freeways. I want to communicate the idea of an interchange […]

New Adobe Illustrator “Join Tool” Aids Transit Map Design!

October 17, 2014
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When Adobe Illustrator finally introduced “Live Corners” in January of this year, I was overjoyed. They’d taken one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in transit mapping – generating properly nested sets of rounded corners where route lines changed direction – and turned it into something intuitive, quick and 100-percent accurate every time. However, it didn’t solve every problem. Joining two separate paths into one (so that Live Corners could be applied to the […]

Question: Differentiating Local/Express Services

August 23, 2014
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An anon asks: What is the best way to display two different lines that share a section if one acts as a local service and the other as an express service? I wanted to use ticks to represent the stations on this map, is there any approach to this problem that allows me to use it? Transit Maps says: The solution here is best summed up by the words of the great Massimo Vignelli, who […]

Question: What’s a good way to display one-way routes on a map?

August 4, 2014
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The only correct answer to this is is to use an arrow that points in the direction of travel. However, there’s plenty of different ways to integrate that arrow into your artwork, as the examples above show: next to your route lines, within your route lines, or even as an integral part of your route line. A lot of it depends on the aesthetic vision of the map, or how much space is available. If […]