Mapping the North Coast 500
A big scale adventure on a slightly small scale
Compared with the enormities of some other long distance routes such as Route 66 or Cape Town to Cairo the North Coast 500 is a more sedate challenge which can be completed within a week. The route was developed locally as a means to promote the far north of Scotland to the tourists who may have stuck to Edinburgh or Skye. It was a huge success, perhaps working a little too well as complaints began to surface regarding facilities to handle the increase in visitors. This book was an opportunity to address traveling the route sustainably.
Building the maps
As a book the smaller size meant a smaller canvas to work with but as with a number of the titles from DK, the idea is not to be a complete step-by-step guide showing every turn, junction and petrol station but to be an inspirational representation of the route. This allows an amount of freedom to play with the map appearance to echo the route and book’s individualism.
Approaching the title with the design team the early talk was of the earthy natural landscapes and curved natural lines immediately turning my thoughts to natural ways to show the route cartographically. The next step was to build a map moodboard to explain to the team where I was thinking of taking to maps. I was pulling together all manners of textures, creatures and imagery. I loved the idea of a carved, honest and natural representation of the route and had started to look at ways to produce this in the book at a sensible budget and technical manner.
The board itself had a number of other maps whose style would match the moodboard created by the design team. These were initial jump points before work started. I also would include existing mapping from other publishers' books covering the routes so we can assess what works and what we felt we didn’t need to include.
Above: Elements of the 6 page moodboard
I initially researched the possibility of using a linocut technique to show the route, a costly but beautiful style which I knew might limit the ability to alter any map elements as the project continued. The book needed to be updated and distributed to other co-publishers which results in restrictions to the methods of production. To address this I began experimenting with digital methods to recreate the style. All text elements have to be in black and all linework needs to be editable to enable adaptation of existing elements such as roads and rail when updates are needed. The cost and time for a quick turnaround on this meant it was not possible and the digital mimicry of the style was not authentic enough to move forward. Such a shame as once the artwork was produced there is an option to use in further products such as promotional canvas prints.
I took data and mocked up a few initial designs to begin conversation with the other project stakeholders. Even if there was no intention of using these styles it is a good method to see what people are really wanting as they are more direct if they see something totally distant from their initial thoughts rather than close but not quite.
Above: Initial brainstorm ideas, a couple using Photoshop neural filters to mimic terrain.
These were launch points for discussion and the level of detail was already too strong.
As expected (and hoped) the design team agreed to keep the maps as simple as possible to allow the commissioned photography to really sing, I began forming the look and feel for a digital map that could feel natural.
Stripping back everything that was not needed or helpful resulted in a single line to progress the route’s journey around the coast. We had a number of diversions to explore which needed to be included but not be seen as part of the main route. This was simply achieved by halving the width of the main route line.
Each section to the book covered a separate part of the route and to show the flow of the route I knocked back the route line to 50% the usual transparency where the line was beyond the extents of the section. This allowed the route to be seen across the map. We pulled up the start and stop points in size to be instantly recognisable on the page.
Designing Styles
Red Line
I loved the slightly off-red, faded lines seen in a number of the moodboard examples which I wanted to echo and that would work having already decided on only using three colours on the map (Text black, the blue water and the route colour - the page itself would be a browny colour throughout the book).
I had played with including arrows to the route but they were not needed. The number dots across the map gave navigation in itself and the arrows were just more noise along the route.
Dot to dot
Towns were originally shown in a traditional circle ‘town spot’ but when the numbers symbols which we were using to link to the text were included the map became too crowded, the sights which were not towns were shown with small square blocks which worked well so we swapped the towns to match. We then dropped the blocks when there was a dot and allowed the numbered circle to carry both the reference and the location of the site. Much tidier.
The water’s edge
As a style we had been avoiding placing solid coastlines on maps for a while to soften the maps, the water colour is usually designed to be different enough to contrast and depict the oceans. In this book I wanted to bring the coastline back but also add a gradated echo of the coast with gaps to depict water movement. This was solely for tidal coastal areas meaning the lochs remained simply depicted.
Above: Detail of coast from printed book.
Inverness in a box
The start of the route featured a number of sights with the city of Inverness. Initially we had thought the city may be its own map separate to the route pages but this soon merged with the first few sights south of the Moray Firth and into the Black Isle. The shape and flow of the map ended up allowing a small inset map to show the centre of Inverness to be shown in the bottom left of the first full page map. This I chose not to frame as it would be too overpowering, instead I added a small percentage of black to the background tint to represent an urban area.
The cut streets, rivers and parks create a naturally implied frame.
An overview and locators
To begin exploring the route we like to include a full spread map to give initial bearings. This was no different and once we were happy with the route map style is was simple to bring across to this overview map. The route line was split to display the sections for the routes and an reference box was placed next to the route to link to the starting page of each section. These boxes were styled by the design team to mirror the information boxes on the main pages of the book.
This was a lovely book to work on and with the commissioned photography by Daniel Alford and Rachel Laidler’s words placed in designs by Senior Designer Laura O’Brein and Managing Art Editor Gemma Doyle.
