Over the summer, pilule a friend asked me to put together a map of Punta Gorda, a small coastal town in the country of Belize. He works for Hillside Health Care International, adiposity a non-profit organization providing medical care in that area. The map was needed to help orient and guide volunteer health care professionals visiting from the States while serving at the clinic. It was to be printed in color on a letter-sized page.

In talking with my friend, I knew right away that the biggest obstacle was going to be getting good local data for the map (and getting it for free, because there was no money set aside for the project). Most importantly, I needed data for local roads (locations and names) and point features (hotels, government buildings, grocery stores, banks, etc.), these being the two main pieces he wanted clinic volunteers to have at their disposal.

Of the big free mapping services, Google Maps had the most complete road network for the town, so it served as my starting point. I had hoped there might be a nice Open Street Map shapefile to work from, but this area is still mostly a blank slate:

So, I decided the simplest and easiest approach to getting those roads on the map would be to trace them in Adobe Illustrator. That’s where the remainder of the map design work was planned, and there was no good reason to construct a spatial database or harness the powers of GIS for our purposes, let alone the time and money to do so. We knew this would limit what what could be done with the map in the future, but a simple map illustration existing wholly outside of a GIS served our immediate purposes on the cheap.

The point features were collected in the field by my friend, who personally biked the streets of Punta Gorda and used his local knowledge and that of others who live there to collect and verify the names and locations of streets and places. His work was all done by hand by annotating an early draft of the map. While he was collecting data, I finished the layout and styling. Then, with his annotations overlaid on my working version, I placed markers at each point of interest (red and blue shapes and National Park Service-style symbols), added labels, and created the index that sits in the lower right-hand corner of the map.

Throughout the production process I captured screen shots showing the evolution of the map. When it was finished I sequenced them together to form a simple movie, as I did for the evolution of a map of downtown Madison, WI. Each screen represents about 10-15 minutes of real production work. While this PDF shows the final state of the map, the Punta Gorda movie (see it bigger here) shows how I got there. As you’ll see, it generally involved the transformation of a satellite image into a map by way of a healthy dose of cartographic abstraction and symbolization.