Coffee & Code - Cartographic Workflows with GIS and Illustrator

While Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide powerful tools for creating, managing, analyzing, and visualizing geographic data, the generation of high-quality cartographic products from GIS often requires additional work in dedicated graphics programs. Adobe Illustrator is often used in conjunction with GIS workflows in the creation of publication-quality maps and other geographic information products. This workshop, jointly developed with Delaney Moghanian (the Multimedia Development Specialist in the UNM Library's Adobe Creative Commons), will demonstrate and provide an opportunity for hands-on practice in the development of initial map images in GIS and then transitioning into Adobe Illustrator to refine and customize those GIS maps.

Tutorial Outline

1. Conceptual Overview - https://github.com/unmrds/cc-cartography_w_illustrator/blob/master/map_design_intro.ipynb
2. Hands-on Practice and Demonstration
   1. Required software:
      1. QGIS: A free, and open source desktop GIS application that can be installed and run on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems - https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
      2. Adobe Illustrator: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html. Adobe Illustrator is included in UNM's Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and is available at no cost for UNM Students, through sponsored licenses for UNM Faculty, and for discounted departmental purchase for UNM Staff. These various options for obtaining Adobe Creative Cloud software titles, including Illustrator, can be found at UNM's Getting Access to Adobe Creative Cloud web page.
   2. GIS Map Generation for extended workflow in Illustrator
   3. Import into Illustrator
   4. Pre-processing - separating content into layers (if needed)
   5. Styling of vector content
   6. Working with text - especially specialized feature labels
   7. Extra Illustrator capabilities
      1. Tracing raster images to vector objects
      2. extracting content from existing GeoPDF (or other PDF) maps
      3. Directly creating basic map products from publicly available basemap data