As a lot of you know I am usually doing either cartographic design or hardcore GIS data processing with FME (and sometimes I have projects where both are combined). The next 2 months are going to include a lot of FME stuff so to balance that I want to produce a nice map, a labor of love, which I can hopefully sell as a poster later on as well.
I have chosen to do a typographic map of Amsterdam (I would love to do Breda, the town where I was born, but I think Amsterdam would be commercially more interesting). I will not be copying the Axis Maps style but instead I'm going to with an approach I've seen on a London map, which is essentially the text from the A-Z map and nothing else. I will be doing all label placement by hand and plan to label streets, water features (canals) and points of interest (museums, monuments, public transit etc). I will also be labelling in Dutch (so "Leidseplein" instead of "Leidse Square" and "Anne Frank Huis" instead of "Anne Frank House") because hey, it's The Netherlands.
This is going to be a long-term process and right now I don't know how long, it depends on how much time I can find for it. But I plan to chronicle the process here.
So step 1 is deciding on the area and the typefaces used.
Area is easy enough, I want to include the historical canal ring of Amsterdam and the parks to the south of city center. At 41 x 61 cm that yields a schale of 1:8000. I might scale down a little bit, there's an interesting area on the northwest side of the map that now gets cut off.
Typeface is a bit more difficult to come up with and I want to get it right at the start. Changing typefaces halfway through may mean different word widths and that may affect the overall placement and I don't want to have to redo placement.
So these are the options I'm considering right now. A sans-serif for streets and a serif for water features. POI's will be a heavier version of whatever I pick for the streets, and maybe a different color too. I'm personally leaning to using Frutiger, as that's my preferred sans-serif, but the fact that Univers gives me an extra weight to play with could come in very handy (probably wouldn't used the 37 variant, way too thin for my taste). I would pair it with Questa, shown here in regular italic and semibold italic, but I think I'll mull this over a bit further during the weekend.
أكثر...
I have chosen to do a typographic map of Amsterdam (I would love to do Breda, the town where I was born, but I think Amsterdam would be commercially more interesting). I will not be copying the Axis Maps style but instead I'm going to with an approach I've seen on a London map, which is essentially the text from the A-Z map and nothing else. I will be doing all label placement by hand and plan to label streets, water features (canals) and points of interest (museums, monuments, public transit etc). I will also be labelling in Dutch (so "Leidseplein" instead of "Leidse Square" and "Anne Frank Huis" instead of "Anne Frank House") because hey, it's The Netherlands.
This is going to be a long-term process and right now I don't know how long, it depends on how much time I can find for it. But I plan to chronicle the process here.
So step 1 is deciding on the area and the typefaces used.
Area is easy enough, I want to include the historical canal ring of Amsterdam and the parks to the south of city center. At 41 x 61 cm that yields a schale of 1:8000. I might scale down a little bit, there's an interesting area on the northwest side of the map that now gets cut off.
Typeface is a bit more difficult to come up with and I want to get it right at the start. Changing typefaces halfway through may mean different word widths and that may affect the overall placement and I don't want to have to redo placement.
So these are the options I'm considering right now. A sans-serif for streets and a serif for water features. POI's will be a heavier version of whatever I pick for the streets, and maybe a different color too. I'm personally leaning to using Frutiger, as that's my preferred sans-serif, but the fact that Univers gives me an extra weight to play with could come in very handy (probably wouldn't used the 37 variant, way too thin for my taste). I would pair it with Questa, shown here in regular italic and semibold italic, but I think I'll mull this over a bit further during the weekend.
أكثر...