![road names in mapublisher road names in mapublisher](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/ukraine-dnipro-floating-restaurant-building-water-name-float-winter-embankment-city-view-river-ice-210819388.jpg)
Using the text tool, add street names to each road path. Create another copy of your backed up road path layers, this one will be where we add the text labels. With brushes you’ll have to carefully expand the appearance of each, and add them together one at a time. With strokes, you can select all of the expanded strokes, hit the “add” button, and you’re done. This is much simpler with strokes than it is with brushes, another reason to use a stroke if you can. To fix this, we'll use the Pathfinder to add the shapes together for the desired effect. Once you’re done, you may notice that the intersections of the roads may look a little funky from your brushes or strokes, and that any borders around the road lines cross over eachother rather than intersecting. You can turn the visibility of your traced template layer on and off to see how it looks. Do the same for all other road layers – keeping a copy of the original paths for each. Make the stroke wide as you wish the road to be:ĭuplicate your first road layer to keep a backup (you’ll need it later - lock it and turn its visibility off to get it out of the way), then apply the brush you created for major roads to those paths, or style those paths with your desired strokes. Another reason we made a backup of those layers! After you're done, you’ll want to expand the appearance of the brushes, or strokes. You don’t have as much flexibility or styling options as you do with creating a brush, but this makes it easier to flatten the roads later. Because we’ve separated our major and minor roads onto different layers, you can define separate brushes for each.Īn alternate way to style the roads is to customize the stroke for the road – make it wider and apply a color. You can also adjust the scale of it later if you decide you want your roads wider. This will tell Illustrator to stretch the shape you’ve drawn over the length of the path. To define a custom brush, draw the shape you want to represent your road, select it, and then hit the “new brush” button in the brushes palette, or drag it into the brushes Palette. Keep each set of roads on its own layer for easy access. You will probably want this one under your major roads layer. Once you have your major roads traced, lock the layer, and create another for minor roads. If you’re tracing several roads, you may want to style them differently. If you draw multiple streets with a single path, you’ll have to break them up later. Pay attention to street names you’re tracing and try to use one path per street, this will make it easier to label them later. Draw your strokes down the center of where the road should be. This will make your path go in the direction your text should go. Start to the left and work your way towards right. Tip – to make it easier when you add the labels to these roads, pay mind to the direction you draw them in. It helps to draw these paths in a color that contrasts with your map so you don’t give yourself a headache looking at all those lines. Trace the roads you want to show on this layer, using the line and pen tools. You may want to have a couple layers, one for major roads, one for minor roads, one for highways, etc.
![road names in mapublisher road names in mapublisher](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Australia_Queensland_location_map.svg/235px-Australia_Queensland_location_map.svg.png)
Place it where you want it, and lock the layer.Ĭreate a new layer for your roads. Scan it, or grab a screen shot and paste it into your Illustrator document as a template.
#ROAD NAMES IN MAPUBLISHER UPDATE#
Maybe when I have time I’ll update these images to show alternate styles.įind your source map – a real map that you can trace. The map I’m doing here is pretty simple, but using these techniques, you can go as fancy and stylized as you want. Illustrator has some cool features that come in handy for this type of illustrated map.
![road names in mapublisher road names in mapublisher](https://www.blacktown.nsw.gov.au/files/content/public/have-your-say/proposed-road-name-at-bungarribee-football-drive/gaz-bisp-football-dr.jpg)
I’ve you’ve done any amount of graphic design, you’ve probably had to draw maps, maybe as directions to an event or office. I did a fun little project this week that I’ve done a few times before, but this time I thought I’d write up a little tutorial on it to share.