Weddingbee Blog

As promised, here is second half of my DIY Illustrator Map Tutorial. You can view the original here, where we left off with this image:

Now we will add the street names.

The most basic way to add text to any Illustrator document is the Type Tool:

However, using just the Type Tool would result in straight, horizontal text and what we’re looking to do is have the text curved, following the curves of the roads. Here comes Paths to the rescue!

You can choose to draw your own paths using practically any of the drawing tools (ie, Paintbrush Tool, Pencil Tool, Line Segment Tool). However, if you want the text to follow the exact curves and lines of your roads, I’ve found an easier method: copy and paste!

Go ahead and select your first road using the Selection Tool:

With the road selected, go ahead and copy & paste it. Once it is pasted onto your artboard, you can use the Selection Tool to position it along the original road. Here is mine, in bright blue so you can see it better:

Now, using the Type Tool, select the new line DIRECTLY which will turn the line into a path that the text will follow. Start typing away. You can re-position the new road name using the Selection Tool.

Continue doing this with the rest of your roads. Add any additional pictures and/or embellishments (a tip: there are many free vector clipart on the web if you don’t want to draw your own).

Now, onto saving. If you want to save your map in a JPG, GIF, BMP, or other common web formats, you would do that by going to File -> Save for Web. However, if you do this you will notice that everything on the document (and not just the parts inside the artboard) gets saved. One way to get around this is to create a Crop Area.

Go to the Rectangle Tool and draw a rectangle above the artboard, directly on top and the same size. You may then see a solid rectangle that covers your map - do not worry. Go to the Color Palette (you may need to manually have it shown by choosing Window -> Color from the menu), make sure the Swatches tab is selected, then select the very top, leftmost swatch (white square with a red slash over it). This will clear your rectangle of any color.

At this point, make sure that your rectangle is still selected and go to Object -> Crop Area -> Make.

This will create crop marks outside your rectangle, which means that when you now save this document in a format other than the default Illustrator, everything outside the crop marks will be cut out.

Here is my final map:

That’s it! Pretty simple, if I do say so myself.