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Many years ago I had an idea to create a map without lines, polygons or symbols…just using purely text. I could never quite get it to work effectively; however with modern illustration software and GIS data, the workflow has became much simpler.

Typographic maps have become quite popular at present. There are some excellent examples by some well known cartographers and artists, such as Axis maps, Paula Scher maps, Ursula Hitz, Stephen Walter and Golden Section Graphics, to name but a few.

Spatial Vision is sponsoring the delegate satchels for the 2012 Brisbane International Geospatial Forum,  and wanted to provide map artwork of Brisbane that was a little bit different. The typographic map of Brisbane was created to give delegates a conference bag that was unique and hopefully they will be happy to display out on the streets.

OpenStreetMap data for Brisbane was downloaded, brought into Adobe Illustrator using MAPublisher and scaled and projected to fit the shape of the satchel. Testing was done with various font styles and colours to come up with a design that was pleasing and a colour scheme that was contemporary. Once the design was settled, the road hierarchy was split from the roads layer to enable labeling in different styles. Labeling used MAPublisher’s label features tool and created text on a path. Each road class had its own unique character style and colour. By copying and pasting text along the path, within a short space of time a complex road network made up of purely text was created.

Suburb names were duplicated and masked to create ‘watermarks’ for the suburb name. Points of interest were shown in black text to stand out from the pastel coloured background.

Angling text parallel to roads and at various angles to each other created a patchwork feel to the map, making it more visually interesting.

For those who missed out on a BIGF conference satchel, a print of the map can be ordered online through Red Bubble. In the future, Spatial Vision will be producing other capital city maps, contact me for details

Craig Molyneux

Senior Cartographer

Spatial Vision

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Check out the other blog in the Cartography as art series

For those who missed out on a BIGF conference satchel, a print of the map can be ordered online through Red Bubble.

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