A hobby of mine are micronations: Online communities that simulate a fictitious nation where “citizens” can debate political issues, found or join parties that run for elections and compete for government.
An important aspect of it is simulating the variety of things that constitute a modern society: Associations, companies, provinces of the nation - and cities. I’d like to create a map of a fictitious city, and I’d like it to look realistic - not necessarily cartographically accurate in the sense of reflecting the cities topography and architecture in a detailed manner. But it should be possible to depict and arrange public buildings, streets, parks - everything you’d find on an ordinary real life city map, together with the names for all these objects.
Does anybody here know a recommendable way of doing this? I tried drawing it manually and scanning it afterwards, but that takes a long time, is difficult to change after completion, and doesn’t even come close to the look of a computer-generated map.
I have some degree of experience with image manipulation software (notably Micrografx Picture Publisher and some Photoshop), and I tried it, but I guess software designed specifically for this purpose would be preferable - and of course professional cartographic software would be too complex and too expensive for me. Is there any freeware or affordable commercial software available that could let me do this, or does anybody know alternative ways to do it?
What you need is a vector drawing program (bitmap-manipulation programs like Photoshop are lnown as painting programs). The canonical commercial example of a drawing program is Adobe Illustrator, there are others. There doesn’t seem to be a GPLed freeware drawing program comparable to The GIMP; I would like to be wrong about this. These programs allow you to make drawings with smooth lines that can be enalrged seamlessly without the pixellated ‘jaggies’ that show up when you enlarge a bitmapped image. You can, for instance, define line styles that include multiple colours and borders to indicate various types of roads and railways and other features.
As I begin a sort of cartographic training here at the University of Wisconsin, I get the sense that Illustrator is the preferred tool 'round these parts. So basically I second what Sunspace said.
Actually, I will say that from my own experiments it’s certainly possible to use Photoshop to make a map, but that’s been with real cities where I could trace aerial photos and things like that. I would totally suck at trying to create something freehand in Photoshop.
Thanks everybody for their advice here. I downloaded a free trial version of a vector drawing program to see what’s in there (I never heard of that before), and after some playing around I think I can say it can create really good-looking results when one knows how to use it.
I’m fond of 3-D perspective city maps and have a decent collection.
I doubt they would help you, though.
Most are from magazine ads or illustrations, or from the brouchures of “Old Towns” or other theme parks. Some will be from the city Visitor’s Bureau maps you find in the booklets given away to hotel visitors.
But they always inspire me. I’ve often made plans to produce a poster sized false map of an imaginary place, or perhaps a real place with lots of poetic license.
I’m planning to cut and paste until I get what I want, then display it on one of those large-screen graphic artist’s monitors at Kinkos. Then take a photo with a film camera. That makes for a print that shows no evidence of pixels. With the right matte finish, it should look like an artist’s print instead of a photo.