Cartographic Tools & Symbols – William Bedford

It is a pleasure to be working in Adobe Illustrator again!

When I was about 5 years into my first job as a cartographer, probably 1987, it was the dawn of the Macintosh era.

It was plain to see that Adobe Illustrator could replace our long hours at the light table and in the dark room, doing type stickup, scribing linework and compositing map layers into four-color composite films for offset printing reproduction.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED that craftsmanship aspect in cartographic design and production. In fact, I miss it quite terribly, but.. I became an energetic early-adopter of Adobe Illustrator’s use in cartography.

Finding it here now, as a mainstream cartographic tool so many years later, makes me feel like a pioneer, but as can happen, my employer was not so ready to make that ‘jump.’ I was going to have to be patient, or do something with the new-found energy and excitement of having discovered Adobe Illustrator’s cartographic potential.

I was very young and ‘this’ led to ‘that…’ The next parts of the story are something I’m always happy to tell, maybe at IMAGIN meetups, MiCAMP events or other casual professional GIS networking events.

I’ll just leave it here that I am absolutely STOKED to find Adobe Illustrator influencing cartography as a mainstream tool so many years later. -Wil

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This first of two examples is from the ‘Tools’ activity in CART621 Lab 2.

It is intended to meet the literal instructions, encouragement to explore, consistency with intentional design principles, and my whims and wishes in the moment.

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This second of two examples is from the ‘Symbols’ activity in CART621 Lab 2.

Three of the symbol colors are intentionally different from the originals.

1. The ‘State Capitol’ symbol is black per my understanding of typical mapping conventions.
2. The ‘Native American Heritage’ symbol is black rather than red to protect from unintentionally offending members of that potential audience.
3. The ‘School’ symbol is a darker ‘brick red’ to avoid the connotations of alarm that surround the brighter red of the original.