Late last year I was asked by Conservation Northwest to produce a map highlighting their work to preserve sagebrush ecosystems in north-central Washington and southern British Columbia, an effort they call the Sagelands Heritage Program.
I worked with Jay Kehne at CNW to consolidate a variety of marked up paper maps to produce a large format (34" x 44") poster showing their area of interest, movement corridors, protected lands, and other features. The map also needed to illustrate which animals inhabit shrub-steppe habitats, so we used silhouette icons and photographs to provide a more complete understanding of the landscape.
This map was a lot of fun to create, and last week it won Best Cartographic Design at the WAURISA Washington GIS Conference!
Below is a low resolution JPG of the map (a full resolution PDF of the map is available here).
The basemap was created in ArcMap, and exported to TIFF. In Photoshop, I created a copy of the map within the study area only and placed it above the basemap. I added a drop shadow to the study area with these settings:
The animal icons were created in Illustrator, in some cases using Image Trace. Movement arrows were created in Illustrator by drawing lines with start/end 45 degree arrows and a very heavy stroke, then converting the path to outlines so the map would be visible under the arrows:
The Photoshop map was placed in InDesign, the animal and arrow Illustrator files were layered on top of the PSD, and text, photos, logos, a QR code, and other map elements were placed on the map.
I worked with Jay Kehne at CNW to consolidate a variety of marked up paper maps to produce a large format (34" x 44") poster showing their area of interest, movement corridors, protected lands, and other features. The map also needed to illustrate which animals inhabit shrub-steppe habitats, so we used silhouette icons and photographs to provide a more complete understanding of the landscape.
This map was a lot of fun to create, and last week it won Best Cartographic Design at the WAURISA Washington GIS Conference!
Below is a low resolution JPG of the map (a full resolution PDF of the map is available here).
The basemap was created in ArcMap, and exported to TIFF. In Photoshop, I created a copy of the map within the study area only and placed it above the basemap. I added a drop shadow to the study area with these settings:
The animal icons were created in Illustrator, in some cases using Image Trace. Movement arrows were created in Illustrator by drawing lines with start/end 45 degree arrows and a very heavy stroke, then converting the path to outlines so the map would be visible under the arrows:
The Photoshop map was placed in InDesign, the animal and arrow Illustrator files were layered on top of the PSD, and text, photos, logos, a QR code, and other map elements were placed on the map.
