Mystery quest map of Oxford

This will give you an idea of the map – I sneakily changed the text for my blog, so that it  can’t be copied!

Because I used two fonts I had to keep adapting the interlinear spacing and that took forever. You can see that it’s quite a lot to read even using a font. Instead of buying fonts, we downloaded a free one – nice, but these come without punctuation or additonal things like numbers. We wanted a hand-written feel and used the font Technical, which I already have; and combined it with the free one, Wabroye. If you really wanted to use it properly, you could always buy it, which is better anyway. But designers do allow free downloads like this to make you want / need to buy it.

Another thing to take into account when working out the timing, is the trials and wrong turns that you take to see what looks best and this can take ages. I actually wrote out Oxford Magic Circle in Uncials, but it looked wrong and the font was less obstrusive.

The very last bit to add to the map was the background. It  was on an A4 sheet with watercolour drawing around the edge, blended using water. I scanned and enlarged it to A3. First it was so dark that it looked dull, so I lightened it to 75% of the original. It still looked dull, and I did a faded cutout  rectangle in the middle. So now the middle of the background is actually white, but fades elegantly into beige.

If I had intended doing the map as an original by hand, I would have more or less still done this entire process, except that I would have adapted it as follows:

• Background on hot pressed paper.
• Rough tracing of map on bond paper.
• Map in centre, traced on lightbox drawn in technical pen – size .5 and size .1 and painted in watercolour.
• Scanned the map (or photographed it) to have a rough to plan on, digitally.
• Done drawings manually and scanned them, then them added to the digital rough in Photoshop to check the scale. I would not have painted the drawings for the rough. (I did a lot of manual fiddling with the title anyway, as well as Photoshop fiddling).
• I’d have found a font that tallied with my lettering size (probably WmM#6 nib, or smaller). I’d have done all the clues in this font size in Indesign.
• At this point I would have a good digital rough – almost the same time scale as the finished digital map, but without colour. I would still have had to rule up the original paper and complete it. You could easily add another 15 – 30 hours for this conversion: 17 captions and 9 drawings, all painted, plus title, plus key etc.

Also if you do it by hand, what happens if is goes wrong? You would not be able to change anything easily. Also, for reproduction, you’d need a very good scan and very good printing. If the client wanted some changes for the next tour, you would be back to square one! Hooray for Illustrator and Indesign and free fonts! I can change anything easily as I have kept it all in layers.
I had a copy printed to check and sent the proof to the client. Once he’d approved, I had the others printed for my client (since my printer-man is very good) and posted them with the map as a pdf on a memory stick. Voila.