How to Make a Map on a Business Card

Video Transcript

"Hi, Alexis Neubert of Alexis Design and this is how to make a map on a business card. I have here a simple map that I created and you do really want to stick to simple when it comes to maps on business cards. It's a small space and you don't want to give too much information in that small space and make it difficult or confusing for somebody to read especially if you really do want them to find your place of business or your location. So let me start with the blank page and I can show you how we get a simple map like that. I'm using here a document in, that I've created in Adobe InDesign; but you can easily create maps using Adobe Illustrator. What you want to be able to do is use a program that has some drawing tools like a pen tool and I do recommend Illustrator or InDesign for, for doing that. No matter what program you're using create a document that's 3 1/2 X 2 inches; either vertical or horizontal depending on what, what you want; but that is a standard business card size so it'll give you right away a good guide as to what space you have. So we're going to start out using our pen tool which you can grab from your tool palette over and we're going to click to establish the first anchor point and we'll be putting our main street here. And if you hold down the shift key, you can make sure to keep your line straight and then up here on the top palette you can adjust the thickness of the stroke. We'll use a three or four point; make something nice and clear and maybe you want to add in a text box using your type tool. You can click and drag a box; choose a font. I like to use really simple, easy to read fonts for this because very often they have to be small. I'm going to choose Aerial and I'm going to try this with an eight point type, but really you can go as small as six and have it be readable, depends really on what your market is and how small you want to make it. So, we're going to type in your street name; get it align the way you want and then you can go on and start creating other streets. Maybe you have a crossed street here; adjust your stroke and if you want to make a line that's curve, you take your pen tool, create your first anchor point; click to create your next enter, anchor point and then drag and what you'll get are these barbells here that can adjust the curve and you can always go back to them and adjust the curve again. You can click and drag again and get another curve and so on and so forth. And then if you need to put one of the street names rotated running the other way; I'll show you how to do that quickly. I'm going to call that one Elm Street and we'll try it with an eight point type. We have our text box selected; we'll go to the top tool palette and use rotate ninety degrees or you can use your rotate tool here on the side palette and just get it to where you want it. It maybe helpful if you want to designate your exact location to use a symbol like a star or an asterisk. There are many dingbat fonts where you can find symbols such as that; Zapf Dingbats is a pretty common font that's found, found on most computers or Web Dings or Wind Dings. But if you just choose a font like that and go through it eventually you'll come upon a star, like I did down here. And that's an easy way to make a business card map."