Web Links
We endorse these products and believe you'll find they will benefit you if you are the do-it-yourself kind who wants to create your own maps, illustrations, images, interactive content online, or track your time.
Check out our Books page with links to books about Adobe Illustrator and Corel Painter.
MAPS & MAPPING
Avenza's MAPublisher plugins for Adobe Illustrator are the premier tools for publishing maps for print or the web. MAPublisher opens the power of GIS functions and data from within Adobe Illustrator's desktop illustration software. Not only will your maps output with high-resolution PostScript and contain the best symbology and color you can find, but their "geography" remains live while you work. Click a line and see its geographic attributes while you work.
MapsAlive is an online interactive tour you can create based on a map. Your web map can have interactive spots (such as the locations of sponsors and advertisers) that pop up sophisticated ads or information boxes. These pop-ups can contain photos, artwork, logos, or text. MapsAlive requires an inexpensive subscription. From there you upload your map, images and text and arrange them in their online work environment. To view a sample tour, click here.
SOFTWARE
Quick...What's the difference between raster and vector? More importantly, what difference does that make to you? Adobe Illustrator creates vector art is not based on pixels like a photograph but on math that works behind the scenes to deliver the highest-resolution and most flexible artwork possible. Art and text are crisp, and everything is editable at any time. Make artwork bigger or smaller and retain crisp edges and clean color. Output to print, web images or Flash.
Corel's Painter software puts digital versions of art brushes in your hands. Your brushes resemble traditional media tools like watercolor, pastel, acrylic and oil paint brushes. Even if you're not an artist, you can clone a photograph and give it the appearance of watercolor, pencil sketch, or another kind of artistic appearance. You can use Painter to learn to draw and paint using an image as a backdrop.
RapidWeaver is Mac-only software that makes creating a website very easy. Based on templates, you can give your site a complete makeover by simply specifying a new template theme. RapidWeaver ships with 40 professionally designed templates--but there's a huge market of 3rd-party developers crafting dynamic and inexpensive themes you can buy and download. If you're a coder, you'll find that themes are editable using a CSS editor.
Available for Windows and Macintosh, OfficeTime is time-tracking and invoicing software that will pay for itself quickly. We use OfficeTime to create quotes for maps and for tracking labor hours. You create your labor categories and hourly rates. When it comes time to invoice, you can use or modify the OfficeTime invoice template to create a customized quote or invoice page that's uniquely yours. Best of all, the invoice is in .rtf (rich-text format) which any text processor can edit.