Inkscape Tutorial: How to Make Minimalist Map Art (OpenStreetMap Data)

i'm rick johansen and this is the iron echo design channel today we're going to make minimalist map art using inkscape and a free resource called open street map and here's some examples i've made in the past this one right here for santa monica we actually made in a previous video so if you want to check that out you can do that but today thanks to mark who left a comment said nicevid can you make the boston one it looks sick and thanks yeah this is actually one i made previously and the thing about inkscape you're always improving and finding new ways to do it so i'm going to break it down today in simple easy to follow steps for like beginner beginner intermediate and you don't you don't have to do boston you can make any place in the world that you want but we're gonna do this green one here now so let's go to some open space and then there's all sorts of ways you can do it but for this exercise we're gonna make an exterior box the interior map area and then we'll drop a lego lego a label on at the end so grab your create rectangles and squares tool and then if you don't have your fill and stroke menu it's just like paint brush thing in the corner and just draw out a rectangle all right so mine has a border called a stroke so we'll take the stroke off under stroke paint just x out of that and then for the fill let's just make it something nice and neutral we'll change it based on our map color at the end but just so you can see there's the exterior box and then a way a simple way to make the interior box just do control d that duplicates this object and then now we'll change this interior color something like neutral really light like that and then you see how it has like the arrows all pointing in right there if you hold ctrl and shift together and draw it in it will keep it'll maintain the ratio so it's like the same object just to scale down a little bit and then i can just um raise it up a little bit and then eyeball it just goes to the part at the bottom all right so then that's the basic that's the easy part now how do we actually get the map data without creating it all from scratch that's where we're going to go to openstreetmap so it's a free resource i'll just go to right now openstreetmap.org it's basically a community of people that put together all this map data from all over the world and then they give us access to it right here so we definitely want to give credit to them and then you would click on this down here the copyright license page and to see how you can give credit make sure that you're recognizing where the stuff came from it's watch watch how powerful it is so i'm on the um open street map this is like the where you can search for wherever you want so type in whatever place you're going up here i got boston queued up and then as you can see it's beautiful like this is this is gorgeous but we need we need to actually go to a version of this that we can download in an svg format that's like a vector file so we can put it into inkscape and then manipulate it and just make it beautiful and they do that for us so if you go over here to layers the version that we can use is standard and here it goes this is um look look how look how deep this is the park okay here's like the swamp boats have you ever been to boston like it's just this is super detailed and this is people like people input all this information so boston has a lot of input which i'll now show you how we can get it out of here into inkscape and then then strip it down all right so get it to where you like it and then over here you see this like share thing click on share and then choose set custom dimensions and then this box here that's not shaded in this is the part that we're going to actually capture so there's two ways you can move it if you want to move the actual edges you can pull the corners like kind of intuitive but if you want to move the whole box it sees like there's nine squares right there i'm gonna move mine so i have some of charlestown go get back bay get south end and right about there just a nice rectangle some of the harbor charles river and i like that all right so important step over here format go to svg that's the vector format we need and then in the previous tutorial i think you saw i did if you type in 1 and then enter that's going to scale it based on the exact data but i'm going to but that's going to be a big file and i usually use that because i want to be real precise but i've learned to speed things up let's not scale it it's already downloading let's not scale it exactly one to one let's go like to one to sixty thousand don't worry about the math it just basically is going to reduce the file size because inkscape is prone to crash and then you'll see when we dump this into inkscape it'll give us a beautiful map and then like for some reason there's a quirk it'll give us like half the atlantic ocean with it all right so let's push download officially map four this is the file i'm going to use and now let's put it into inkscape okay we're back in inkscape i'm literally just going to drag in the file that map4 file and then i have to have include svg image as an editable object so that's the most important one and then dpi i've now been trying a hundred it just seems to make again the file size a little bit more manageable and click ok and it'll think for a second and then when i do it it ends up way up in the northwest quadrant and then you'll see just a whole lot of ocean it's best to zoom out so you can find it okay there's part of the ocean and there it's just a lot of water all right zoom in so in the previous tutorial i delete out the ocean right away to kind of like bring the file size down but when i have a peninsula map i like to keep it because we're going to use it at the end and then re-colorize it all right so zoom in and then how are we going to make this look less busy without spending all this time there's some shortcuts so you could just click on each random object like whatever that blue square is and just delete it but then we got to go through all of them so instead inkscape's got a really good tool let's click on one of them and then see how like the fill and stroke menu opens up so i know that the fill is that color i know i got the right object if you go to edit then select same and then select the same fill color now it collects all those little purple things and then you can push delete and they're gone so same thing with like these triangles collect the triangle we know it's a fill sometimes they're a stroke it's confusing but that's on a fill i go to edit select same fill color and then all the triangles are gone that's one way you can go quick the other way is when you're zoomed in like this if you hold shift you can just drag a box over stuff you don't want so like if you can keep keep the labels if you want but i don't want them so no back bay no 133 no south end all this stuff you can just keep pushing shift and then collecting all the yeah we'll keep boston for now i don't need this street sign and then just delete that out gone oop i missed that part so i'll go back to that just hold shift make a box over it i don't want 23. you know what i don't emboss i'm going to get i don't want any labels i'm going to go real real minimalist and then up here i don't need this don't need 27. all right so i missed the box again all right then delete so you get the picture okay let me show you a distinction so if you see these dotted lines like that's clearly a stroke so i click on it i see it's on a stroke then i can go to edit select same stroke color and it collects all those things and then we get rid of all the lines at once but then this one this just looks like a stroke right if i click on it it's not a stroke it's a fill so you go to edit select same fill color and then you can get rid of all that we're getting there through the magic of editing i'm going to clean up the last of these words and everything and then we're going to make the streets themselves actually thinner because it looks better without these big thick interstates there we go it's all cleaned up so now click on one of the roads anywhere actually actually doesn't matter where you click just click something and then this trick you can't we're not going to go after a fill or a stroke go to edit select all we're going to get everything the whole entire map and then so inkscape's not even sure what to make of this so if we're on our fill and stroke menu for stroke style it's not inches it's not pixels it's just percentage 100 so we're going to make the width of everything under stroke any stroke on the whole map let's drop it down to like 40 470 40 then click enter there we go okay so let's take off these blue bandages just click anywhere off the thing and then look at that you see how it's like showing the individual on-ramp off-ramp this is actually south this is the train station down there but so the trick we just did if you're doing a different area of the world when you have a lot of detail sometimes inkscape will make it look like a really big thick line and all we did is we select it all and then we changed the overall stroke size we've reduced it so it looks all a lot cleaner like this all right so now we can work on re-colorizing it so this is all personal preference we can change it to a different color scheme i'm going to go with that like green and gold so one thing i like to do i've got like a rogue r let's get rid of that what i'm thinking i like to do is i actually i will pull out the ocean for later or the water if it's a simple coastline you can just draw it in later but this is real complicated and like these this is like important stuff like i used to live right here and cross this bridge i lived over here just uh this means a lot to me all right let's move some water so let's click on the charles river here and then see how it shows it's a fill we'll use the same tool as before edit select same fill color and then that it looks like it's got everything but what about the big ocean it's got it it's just so we can't see the edges of it so i'll do ctrl g it's going to group everything now i can drag it away just to we're going to use it later so there it goes looks like it didn't oh it got everything all right so zoom out and then just pull it away i don't want to mess with that now i just want it off the area i'm going to recolor so move move move and what's all this it's uh this is probably the ferry line so this we can go click on one of those let's see that is a that's a stroke so go to edit select same stroke color and then those all go so as you see once you get the hang of it it's pretty easy i've kept this gray box as part of the map just so it's like simple to see let's get rid of it now just click on it move it out of there and then and that looks that looks pretty good but we're gonna we're gonna give this one nice green theme to it so let's push shift and then grab everything you can get and then we're gonna group it so ctrl g and all we're doing is we want every single piece of this remaining map to get colorized here so then it's all selected go to filters color and then down here there should be one called simple blend click on that and then this is going to give us a menu box with some choices so nothing's going to happen until you push live preview but i have it set to this you can play with these like sometimes i use screen multiply but in this case i want it to be like green white and then the we'll make the water like gold at the end so for us in this case we're going to go to hard light and then go to live preview and so okay so that's like i think i was using that for like santa monica but anyway so we don't want blue though we want to go green so it won't render until we click live preview again at least for my machine so i'll go to somewhere in the greens we'll try that see what that looks like all right that's cool but i want to go darker so i think i'll just pull this down deeper into the corner there live preview and i like this that looks good so we'll go with this so click apply and then close and then we've got our we got our our boston now let's bring our water back in so i'm going to grab my waterway and then see how that's the coastline this looks cool too you can make like a negative you want to make like a waterway map but now let's put it back when you bring the water back in just find a reference point like this right here i think this is the museum of science like right here it just clicked into place great okay let's change the water to gold so i got my one part of the water selected and i'm gonna use the old trick so go to edit select same fill color and now we should have the whole thing now we'll find out click and yeah we did st patrick's day and then before they let's make it before they cleaned before they cleaned the boston harbor it looked pretty bad but now it's beautiful so we'll go to some type of gold where do we want it right there i like it all right so zoom out now and we need to group everything together so first click on the ocean you know you have that because you'll see the the fill is there and then hold shift and just grab all of your map like go beyond where you need to go and then we didn't get everything so shift grab everything so all right so now i've got it so i've got my map and then you just have to trust that the ocean's grabbed because it's uh the borders like off-screen then do ctrl g that will group everything it'll think for a second and then now it's all grouped we can create our clipping mask so go to create rectangles and squares and then draw out a the area you want to actually put on the the final poster so if you want an exact area let's say there was like a specific dimension i've got up here width and height you can change i'm on millimeters so let's just say you wanted something specific 130 96 then there you have it but then i can't see what i'm doing so under here there's opacity i'll lower that somewhere so i can see maybe get a little closer and then this is whatever you need so i think i'll take most of boston i'll get back bay a little bit of charlestown and just call it right there just i always take the opacity off just out of habit so i've got the the clipping mask selected then hold shift and get the whole thing and then again i don't see my border hash marks like normal but it's collected and then you go to object clip set and then you did it there's your mask all right all right let's put it on to the original poster board we made actually i changed colors when you weren't looking but here we go let's slide it into place and take a look and there you go it's all over hopefully it wasn't too bad let's see it you

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 7,646

Keywords: Graphic Design, Inkscape, Affinity, Photoshop, Startup, Design, Tutorials, Tips, Logo, Map, Art, Minimalist, Boston, Rick, Johanson, Edit, Select, Same, Tutorial

Id: IfFSfn-AAcA

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021