Creating a map of Central Europe for a tourism app

I worked with TravPro Mobile to create maps for many destinations for their mobile sales app. Their app informs travel agents about travel destinations. One of our projects was for a map of Central Europe.

The team at TravPro Mobile sent me a list of countries, cities, and attractions they wanted to highlight on this map. They also wanted to show major airports, cities with a population larger than 500,000 in surrounding countries, and distances between cities.

The first draft I sent had all the information they asked for, but without any work on style or colour yet. (In recent projects I’ve started to provide a black and white layout draft before adding map information or styles).

first draft of Central Europe map for TravPro Mobile

They liked the density of features and wanted a couple of other cities added, and sent me a list of cities to add a distance chart. They also sent me their client’s logo to use as a guide to apply different colours to each of the highlighted countries.

second draft of Central Europe map for TravPro Mobile

The maps didn’t yet have enough visual appeal so we added some physical features for more interest. I prepared the final draft with three options: one with rivers and lakes, one with underlying terrain imagery, and one with both.

draft of Central Europe map with rivers and lakes
draft of Central Europe map with terrain image
draft of Central Europe map with terrain and rivers

The colours with the terrain image were muted because I had to increase transparency of the country layer to view the terrain layer underneath. So I sent a couple of options with transparency on the country layer reduced to brighten the colours. (I’ve since learned that I can change the colour ramp on a greyscale terrain image so I don’t need to overlay a separate colour layer.)

Here’s a look at the layers I used for this map. It’s a simple map but still has 16 layers (not including the distance chart, which I sent them as a text file to use elsewhere in their program.) 

layer list for Central Europe map

For the final draft they selected a version with brighter colours and just a hint of terrain underneath.

Map of Central Europe for TravPro Mobile

I sent them a vector version with labels in categories that can be toggled on or off, so they can export multiple png files for their app.

We’ve also worked together on maps for Thailand, Taiwan, California, Florida, Peru, Egypt, Cuba, Bahamas, Mexico, Antigua & Barbuda, and the British Virgin Islands.

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