The main thing I learned over the course of this project was how to use Illustrator. This was a new program compared to photoshop which is what we primarily used for the semester. While there are some similarities between the programs, even the tools that carry over don’t act the same so it was really interesting to learn to use the new {or “new”} tools. The easiest was probably doing either the warped text – for the banner – or doing the roads. Those were easier for me as I either already new what I wanted the end result to look like, or had it relatively simple with what I had to “trace”. The hardest for me was probably the legend – just because for all that I focused on a relatively small area, there were a lot of “focus points” within that area that had to be marked and titled. In addition, It took me a bit to figure out how to get the markers to look right, and cohesive with the rest of the map. I’d say that there are two ways my submission could be improved, by either changing the colour scheme, so it isn’t just shades of 1 colour, or by re-doing the roads, so that they stand out a bit more compared to the garden paths. I think the one thing that would improve the project would be if there were larger “breaks” between learning the individual portions of the project – like the symbol sprayer or warped text. Out of everything I learned for this project the things I am most likely to use in the future – outside of personal projects – would the symbol “control” stuff, or the live painting stuff. {Though I figured that out primarily on my own}. There wasn’t really anything that Inspired me, outside of remembering That I had been to Edinburgh Castle in the past.
{The “masterlist” of symbols I grabbed from}
