Introduction to Graphic Design with Adobe Illustrator.

Module 2 – Introduction to Graphic Design with Adobe Illustrator.

For this assignment we were given a scenario to create a basic Florida map for a children’s encyclopedia. The map was first created in ArcGIS 10.3. You had to bring in elements from geodatabase (gdb), the counties, capital, the major cities and surface waters.  Then you added the legend, north arrow and scale bar.  Once that was done you exported the map as an AI file extension (Adobe Illustrator).

After opening the file in Illustrator, your first task is to organize your layers and create new layers to help you keep organized.  The one thing you must do is to move all the scale bar segments to the geographic content layer, if not when you resize the layer for any reason the scale bar will not resize to the correct proportion.   Then you need to decide how you want your map to look: what colors, text style and size, placement of the legend, scale bar, and north arrow.  We were also asked to change the symbol style of the capital and major cities using a script file which made the changes much easier to do.  As part of the map you were asked to show some of the state symbols like the state’s flag, the state’s flower, state’s animal and so on. For my map I used the drop shadow as an effect to help bring attention to the symbols.