Another use for Adobe Illustrator: Drawing maps and floor plans

Illustrator isn't just used for sketching and drawing, it can also be used for drawing maps and floor plans! Adobe Illustrator CS4 is pretty neat for close-to-accurate illustrations as it has dynamic smart guides to speed up positioning and alignment of objects.

Anyway, recently, I had to do a floor plan for one of my assignments in my university. My current assignment is to perform a safety audit with my group members, on the biochemistry laboratory in my school.

Since the floor plan was not available, we had to manually draw it by ourselves.

I thought Adobe Illustrator is quite useful and efficient for this task.

I just scanned in the hand-sketched plan into my computer, placed it in the first layer, and drew over it on the second layer. Pretty fast and easy!

The final product:

I realised, it can also be good for drawing maps! For example if you wanted to lead someone to your home, but it’s not very well known to be recognised in google map like other landmarks, you can easily use the same technique i used above to illustrate a map to your destination.

For example, my house is the one circled in red above and I wanted to lead people there because I am having this majorly awesome party. Problem is, no one knows how to get there because it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Just print screen that map in satellite format in google maps, and place it the first layer in Illustrator.

Open up a new layer and place this above the map layer. Draw major landmarks, highways, housing areas, major buildings and ignore bushland and terrain. Oh and remember to label what you draw.

Add in arrows to give direction.

After you’re done, just delete the first layer, and you have your map!