I’m working on a project of small maps showing everywhere I’ve lived. I used SnazzyMaps to make a map style that worked well for me. The style below is good for small neighborhood maps that even show home outlines. You can save the maps as PNG files 10 times per day.
Map style I published. It won’t work well for a large area map:
I used a 1000px x 1000px map with a scale factor of 3x, this seemed to make the lines sharper.
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I then put it in Illustrator and hit 6 color trace. This enabled me to save it as an SVG and each color was a separate process. There were extra processes that I had to ignore, but it worked well for my needs. In the Glowforge UI, I changed the power settings for the streets and highways. I also used illustrator to highlight my old apartment.
I have 9 addresses in 16 years, in 3 different states. I’m going to frame them and have something on it that says something like “home is where we are”
A few years ago someone asked us if we were ever coming home. I told them home is wherever I am with my wife. I want to come up with something like that.
I want to, but I’m new to illustrator and I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. When I make a box in the bottom right corner to put an address, it still shows the streets through when I make the SVG file, even when it looks right in the .ia file. I might hold off on engraving any more until I figure that out.
I got a great jumpstart from this video by @chris1
Check out a couple of his other videos on YouTube too. One of his videos talks about subtracting one area from another which is the trick you’ll need to create white space in AI
There was also this link today:
(current price is under $15 so I’m thinking about it, although I know enough now that random YouTube and Adobe videos should get me through )
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