Illustrated South Florida Map
This is one of my latest projects... an illustrated map of South Florida for Florida International University's recruitment booklet. The folks at FIU were great to work with and I met some nice people.
Most of my maps are close to real scale if not true in scale, so maps like this one that cover such a large area really require me to think differently. There is a balance that must be kept between the liberties you take exaggerating scales and the true scale that makes a map a map. I started this map in particular with a painterly landscape and created the "point of interest" illustrations on top of it. The philosophy being that the map without anything on it should be just as visually appealing as the stuff I pile on top of it. The exaggerated perspectives of the spot illustrations wasn't measured out with any geometric formula or anything although I did try to maintain a bit of a fish-eye lens feel to it. And yes, drawing the Aquarius habitat was really fun.
Escape Key Graphics’ vector based maps can be blown up to a poster of any size with little or no degradation and Escape Key Graphics’ 3D maps can be rendered from different angles and zoom extents creating endless new possibilities. The 3D method can also provide a more realistic look than the vector method. In both cases buildings, paths and everything else in your map is like an object that can be moved, shrunk, deleted, etc, making revisions easy and quick. Expansion of your park, site, or facilities seldom means recreating your map from scratch. Please see my portfolio for more examples.
