Weddingbee Blog

Mrs Hibiscus had written a wonderful DIY map tutorial using Powerpoint. Her beautiful map gave me tons of ideas, but I ended up using Adobe Illustrator to draw my own map. Illustrator is a very powerful tool with loads of features, some of which are downright difficult to master, but a basic map can be pretty simple. So I’ve decided to write a step-by-step tutorial for the Weddingbee community.

Before I start, I want to let you know that I am creating this tutorial on Illustrator CS2 on Mac OS X. Therefore there may be small discrepancies if you’re following along on a different version of Illustrator or using Windows, but the basic idea should be the same.

Here is the map image that is included in our invitations:

The first thing to do is to obtain a map of the area you want via Google Maps, Mapquest, or similar. If you’re having trouble saving an image of the map, you can always use a screenshot. I actually used two screenshots for this map so that I could show the zoomed-in area. You may choose to do the same or not.

Now, open Illustrator and create a new file based on your dimensions. At this point, I started to draw the map freehand just by looking at the screenshot. However, this method isn’t for everyone so I will go over an easier way - by tracing over an image of an existing map.

Since the streets of NY are pretty linear and a bit boring from a bird’s eye view, let’s try a map of my alma mater, where Mr Peony and I met. I took a screenshot of its location using Google Maps.

In order to import the image of the map to Illustrator, go to File -> Place. Then choose the map from its saved location. You should have something like this:

You can now resize the image using the 8 little squares on the sides and corners of the image. Continue to resize and reposition until the area you want is in the artboard (the black bordered box). Don’t worry about the area outside the artboard - we’ll worry about that later.

Now we can start tracing over this map to draw the roads! Probably the easiest way to do this is to use the Line Segment Tool:

As the name implies, this tool lets you draw straight lines. You can control the color (stroke), thickness (stroke weight), and style of the line through the Control Palette, which is docked to the top in my screen but may be docked to the bottom on yours.

If you prefer to include some curves in your roads, you can use the Paintbrush Tool:

Because Illustrator is a vector-based program, the lines you draw with the Paintbrush Tool (and the Pencil Tool) will automatically be smoothed-out. Again, you can control the color, thickness, and style of the line using the Control Palette. Let’s get drawing!

Notice that the gray line is above the red line because I drew it after the red. I actually want the gray line to be below the red, so I go to the Selection Tool (black arrow on the top left) and select the gray line. I then Ctrl-click (right-click for Windows) to bring up a short menu of options. Go to Arrange -> Bring to Back or Arrange -> Bring Backward (bring to front sends the selected item all the way to top, and bring forward brings it one step up).

Continue to draw all the lines. I decided not to draw some of the smaller roads and that’s perfectly fine. Here are the finished lines:

Since the road tracing is now complete, you may now delete the original map from the workspace. Just select the map using the Selection Tool, and hit the Delete button. That’s it!

It’s starting to look pretty, isn’t it?

Next up…adding street names using paths!