OUGD405 STUDIO BRIEF 3 - MAP MAKING

After doing my mock up book I decided to include a world map page to my publication, to show where even more places are within the world, and for people to read it slowly at their leisure. 

To include this page in my publication however first I had to actually make the map.

I saved a simple world map I found from Google Images, which has the borders on for all the countries.

I then traced the photograph on a light box and a fine liner, to create my own version of the map, so I wasn't just straight copying the photograph.

I loaded the trace onto Photoshop and removed the background, and adjusted the layers so that the black looks more black and the white looks more white. This helped me to determine each individual country easier. I also used the paintbrush tool to make the white areas larger and the black outlines thinner, as the smallest fine liner I had to do the tracing was a little to thick still and the ink ran through the paper a little bit, making rather thick outlines. The paintbrush tool helped me to make these outlines the right stroke weight.

I then loaded the map onto Illustrator and image traced it, to create sleek outlines of all the countries. I then used the smart fill tool to fill in all the countries different colours. I found it really tricky to find so many different nice looking colours that all complimented one another, so I am afraid to say that there are some bad colours in here. Perhaps I should of just stuck to one or two different colours and used a wide variety of shades from those colours, maybe that would look more effective and creative. I used the pen tool to write the names of the countries either in the country itself or nearby with a line pointing to the actual country. Because some countries are really small with not much room around them at all, such as mainland Europe, some countries I had to miss out including the names of, because there simply wasn't enough space. This is a shame, and maybe if I had produced my map on a larger scale I could of included the names of all the countries.