Week 4 - Intro to Illustrator

GIS 3015

This week in my Cartography Skills class we were introduced to Adobe Illustrator.  From what I have seen, visually Adobe Illustrator takes Cartography / Map making to the next level.  Although the ESRI program ArcMap is very robust, it does lack some of the artwork that Adobe Illustrator can provide.  This week's class introduced us to some of the basic functions of AI and taught us how to save MXD files as an AI file and open them in Adobe Illustrator to manipulate them further.  This week we focused on familiarizing ourselves with the Workspace and some of the tools provided there.  We used shape tools, line tools, text tools and layer palettes all in order to present a final map in a more aesthetically pleasing way.  The above map shows the cities, and county boundaries for Florida.  Using Adobe Illustrator we grouped objects together that would allow them to be manipulated and resized all while maintaining their relative positions.