Mapping projects with the City of Brantford

Updating tourism wayfinding maps

Over the past several months I worked with different teams at the City of Brantford updating maps and designing new ones.

Their Planning Department designed outdoor wayfinding maps and needed help making some edits to the existing design files to meet their fall deadline to install the signs.

The Tourism Marketing team sent me their Illustrator files, and I updated and renumbered some points of interest and reorganized the legend categories.

I resized the art boards to match each sign dimension and added “you are here” points for each site.

detail of Brantford wayfinding map showing Harmony Square

Most signs were a similar size so only needed minor size adjustments. The sign for the Harmony Square map was much smaller so I created a new layout removed the street index from the right side of the layout, as there wasn’t enough room to keep that without reducing the map size.

wayfinding map of Brantford

Updating tourism maps for visitor guide

Shortly after finishing the wayfinding sign updates, another team at the city contacted me for assistance. Their Communications team designed the map but needed help plotting accurate locations for attractions.

They sent me a spreadsheet with GPS locations, which I geocoded in my software to plot on the Illustrator map file they also provided. 

Their graphic designer provided artwork for the symbols for each category of points on the map (i.e. hotel, attractions, libraries, parks, etc.), the Tourism Department sent me a list of categorized points which I plotted, then I reorganized the legend with updated categories. 

And they asked me to design a detail map of the Downtown area for the back of the map, in the same style as the full city map they already had.

map of downtown Brantford for visitor guide

Designing wayfinding maps for river access points

This winter I worked with the Tourism Marketing Team again to design maps of river access points to be installed on wayfinding signs along the Grand River in Brantford

These maps focus on the section of the Grand River as it runs through Brantford, and show three river access points and a handful of attractions. 

map of Brantford river access points on the Grand River

The City is aiming to install the signs by early summer, and I’m looking forward to checking them out on a paddling trip in a few months!

Please follow me on LinkedInInstagram, and Facebook.

To make sure you don’t miss the next blog post, sign up to my newsletter to receive news and updates.