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This map turned out to be quite the exercise in assignment interpretation.

Our magazine editor turned to me for what appeared to be a fairly simple map, but he had some very specific styles in mind. I had a clipping indicating what color palette to use, another with a design/format example to follow. Oh yeah, and I had to incorporate a provided map.

OK, it sounds simple enough. But diving into the process, I found early on that I had to be methodical to ensure I nailed all the specs right in Illustrator.

It worked. My only regret is that the process is a little too time-consuming to integrate into our paper. Too bad; the graphics would be a lot cooler. Someday, maybe.

(BTW, there's no labels on this map because I was asked to allow the designer to put them on to maintain consistency with fonts. Which suited me fine since labeling is the worst part of designing maps. So monotonous.)

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UPDATE: I actually did figure out a way to integrate this style into our regular graphics for the paper using Google Earth and Photoshop. I honed the process and styles myself for a few months and am now passing off the process to our front-page designers. I'll post a few here sometime.

Let them eat pie

One of the graphic designers I supervised for a time was constantly giving me grief about the minimal number of colors available for a proper pie chart intended for newsprint.

Minimal colors? Huh? Clearly, she never had box of crayons with more than 16 colors in it. Sad.

Anyway, when this assignment came along, I decided to use it to prove to myself once and for all that she was sorely mistaken. Each of these colors is an exact match for a color in our PC color palette, which means the reproduction is guaranteed to work, and the colors will end up differentiated from one another. It ain't rocket science...

It would have been a complete victory had the final graphic not ended up running in black and white due to technical difficulties. *Sigh*

(Incidentally, this isn't how the the key/chatter appeared in print. The words were added to the page in proper format — and better arrangement — after the chart was imported into our PC design platform.)