Get maps at your fingertips and enhance creativity

Let me paint you a picture — you’re at work and a new project from a top client of yours has just been submitted. The client has a conference coming up and they need a way to showcase the reach of their company and products. Using a highly detailed map, they want to geographically plot each attendee’s travel distance from their home city to the city where the conference is being held. This map has been requested last minute, with just two days’ notice and over 3,000+ attendees to plot. What do you do?

Let’s get started quickly

Creating a design that involves a detailed map may not be an everyday task. However, we found that 80% of designers and creatives have faced this challenge at some point. Whether it’s a last-minute effort or you have weeks of preparation, how do you plan for these types of projects? Answers may vary, but a common response has been to just trace a map within Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, create layers, and then begin plotting out your data. While this may sound relatively easy, how much time are you willing to waste on tracing? There are also potential legal implications to consider. Some of the most common map sources we typically think of as consumers purposely add incorrect data and points of interest into their map to protect against unauthorized use.

Introducing Esri

So, what can you do in these types of situations? This is where Esri comes in. For those of you who haven’t heard of Esri, we are the largest Geographic Information Systems (GIS) company in the world, providing the most advanced mapping software and services to customers in all industries. One of our products, ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud, was built specifically for designers who use maps to do things like telling stories, advertising products, producing compelling images, and creating infographics. Maps for Adobe was specifically created to empower designers with the most capable mapping platform available, no background in geography required. This platform not only gives you access to your own organization’s authoritative spatial data, but also a global community of users who have contributed their data as well. You’ll have the most comprehensive collection of base maps and layers at your fingertips, in both vector and high-resolution raster formats.

Why this matters?

Time seems to never be on the side of the designer, but now it can be. Imagine streets, building footprints, points of interest, and so much more as vector artwork right inside Illustrator. To put it simply, Maps for Adobe will enable you to create maps in a fraction of the time that it used to take. Why deal with painstaking tracing when — with just a few clicks — you can have all the building footprints in downtown Los Angeles, a subway map of New York City, a detailed street network of Houston, etc. With the data already available in manageable vector layers, you can finally focus on your creative work rather than the time-consuming process of gathering or creating content. Whether you’re plotting the top Labor Day vacation destinations, showing where the Top 25 farthest-recruited NCAA Basketball recruits came from, or crafting a story all your own, Maps for Adobe will give you a higher-quality end result in much less time.

With the latest release, Maps for Adobe also provides spatial analysis tools so you can do things like creating travel time polygons, enriching your layers with demographic attributes, generating buffers around points, and more. Additionally, we’ve launched a new “Plus” user type. This gives you a lighter weight, monthly account option which is perfect if you don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with a full subscription.

Take your designs to new places and explore the world of mapping. It no longer has to feel like a chore, but rather an opportunity to tell stories in new and exciting ways. We’ve removed the mapping misery so you can focus on your creativity.