Bay Area of San Francisco
- What did you learn?
When working on this project, I learned much more about what Illustrator has to offer. Aside from adding several strokes to a line, I improved my skills with the Pen Tool, warped objects such as the banner seen above, and learned how to combine different shapes to make one, unified object.
2. What was easy?
The easiest part of this assignment was adding the labels and tracing the map. I know that tracing with the Pen Tool takes some time to get used to, but after a few mistakes here and there, I was able to trace parts of the map in a realistic fashion. Not to mention that once you have your line segment, you can always edit it at any point, so using the Curve Tool and Anchor Point Editor allowed me to polish any misaligned edges or bumps along the way.
3. What was challenging?
The most time-consuming and difficult part of this project was definitely the symbols. Until I was able to submerge myself into using the Pen Tool efficiently, trying to draw the shapes wasn’t easy. To assist with this, I headed over to Google, looked at various kinds of of 2D images to get a reference of what I wanted to create, and then went about it from there.
4. How could your submission be improved?
One thing that I would’ve loved to continue developing/fixing if I had the time would be the junctions for the roads. If you look closely, you can see that for a few roads, the one end of the road doesn’t fully merge itself into the other connecting it. Since you have to look fairly close, I decided to leave it, but in the future, I would make sure to take more time and tweak this part a bit. Besides that, everything else turned out the way I had originally hoped.
5. How could I improve the assignment for the next class?
Once again, I really don’t see the need to change anything. Each requirement for this project was doable and allowed for us to explore Illustrator to an extent.
6. How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?
In work scenarios or other assignments, I would be able to use the Pen Tool to accurately trace a path or object. Also, I could make basic symbols needed to indicate someone or something.
7. How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?
The main inspiration that sparked this project was my trip to San Francisco and Yosemite in 2019. Out of every place I’ve been too, this definitely cracks the top 5. Plus, I could now cross this item off of my Bucket List. When brainstorming for this assignment, I initially felt that the Bay Area of San Francisco alone was too “large-scale”, in which at one point I was tempted to scrap this idea and look for a different approach. In the end, I’m complacent that I didn’t, since not only have I actually been to this location, but it was very enjoyable being able to “recreate” my trip and reeling in all of those memories to forget the cataclysmic times of change that was 2020.