For Starters...

(click the image for larger version)

I made this map on behalf of my brother for our father for Christmas 2007. My brother lived in Arlington until this summer when he and his wife moved out to California. Our father and he drove his car across the country and later, my brother asked me if I knew of any good websites or businesses to go to for a custom map to commemorate the trip. I did a little bit of searching on the web but didn't find anything, so eventually I just had the idea to do it myself since that would be a lot cheaper and I'd have full control over the final product.

I did the preliminary work in ArcGIS, assembling the data on the places they stayed overnight and the locations of their major stops. The state boundaries and the nice relief image that makes up the background I found on the National Atlas site. After much consternation and effort, I settled on the World Equidistant Cylindrical projection, mainly because it stretched the lower 48 states enough to match the 24"x36" dimensions I'd chosen for the poster without leaving much space around the sides. Once I had the rudiments of the map laid out and its data components assembled and placed in ArcGIS, I exported the map to Adobe Illustrator to do the real artistic work.

My brother had the idea of drawing the route depicting their travels from the start with callouts for their prominent stops. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to get good imagery/logos for most of the stops (the stop in Virginia is my own house. I wasn't going to include it but he wanted it on there.) The route itself is derived from highway data. He didn't recall the exact highways they'd gone on but I figured what I had was close enough. If I were doing it again I might smooth the roads if I thought it would look better. The color scheme changed a few times during the process, and I think the final scheme works really well with the USA theme and is easy to read.

The pictures on the lower left and right are digital photos they took on the trip, and they were easy to add in Illustrator. The title block graphic is just an American flag graphic I pulled off the web, stretched slightly and cropped and then made transparent to dull the colors to make the text readable. The bottom tip of Texas is cut off but I can live with that. I searched Google for methods of making "flaming" text for the 114 degrees indicator in Arizona, though I can't find the exact site I used. I think the flaming text turned out really well.

The whole project took about...25-30 hours, including all the revising and brainstorming. I was able to plot it on glossy paper at the highest quality, and the poster looked great. I got a nice wooden frame for it and we presented it to our dad for Christmas. He was pretty moved by it and everyone was impressed with how it turned out, including my brother, since it was the first time he'd seen it in person (I'd been emailing him PDFs regularly.) I'm really pleased with how the map turned out since I hadn't done a large, artsy map before.