Infographics

Technical Drawings

Honour Over Glory

BLING!

Save Japan

Layout

Richard Hollis

Geo Patterns

MVUF Icons

I got the animals down, now I need the rest of it. I looked up a lot of icons for various sections of the map to get ideas of what to use, then sketched out a load of ideas.

Obviously the next part was to vector them. To be honest a lot of them were quite easy to get my head around, possibly because they're so everyday (symbols for shop, toilets etc) but there were a couple that took a bit more planning - the allotments, greenhouse and solar panels in particular. But I got round em eventually.

I needed a device to display the pictograms in, in order to keep them regulated and as part of a set. I had toyed with leaving them as the were on the map but decided they'd probably get lost within all the detail. So this way they can all be connected.

MVUF New Map

I've developed a new map and I'm feeling pretty happy with the direction its going in. It was important to start with sketching out the areas involved so i know where everything is. 

Then I printed off a number of large scale copies of the farm taken from google earth, so its literally a real-size satellite arial-view copy of the farm itself. I then took 2 massive sheets of tracing paper and sketched the main sections out on the map, in rough-ish forms, so trees (outlines), fields, buildings, the river etc, and once that was done, over a lightbox I transferred those images onto paper, scanned them in, then set about tracing it on illustrator.

The trees are a partiular problem so for now I'm just using sets of circles to give the tree effect.

Et voila! An almost finished version. Barring a few alterations and changes I think this is a winner, for 2 main reasons: 1) its simple. It's clear and uncomplicated. And 2) its not too clinical that its unfriendly or stale. I think I struck a nice balance.