We live in an era in which maps (and plenty of other graphics) are made with digital tools. Workflows vary, but the end result is that a lot of us base our cartography entirely on clean vector shapes and neat raster grids. For example, I talked earlier this year about a map I made of my brother’s housing association. Behind the scenes, it’s made of straight line segments and simple curves.
The software paints clean, precise colors along those paths, with an unwavering hand. But perfectly flat colors and mathematically precise shapes are rare in nature. Look around yourself and notice the tiny variations, wobbles, and unevennesses in everything around you. We are surrounded by organic forms and colors. In contrast, clean digital graphics carry the feeling of being artificial and controlled. And that’s often just fine — even desirable in many circumstances.
In contrast, some of my colleagues, such as Molly O’Halloran, have instead found their cartographic success through drawing by hand, or through a manual-digital hybrid.
Manual works like these stand far apart from digital precision: the lines are uneven, the colors variable. Each hand-drawn letter is a little different, lacking the consistency of a font. And all this variability is a big part of what attracts readers. It feels cozy and comfortable because it feels more like the real world, the ones that our brains evolved to engage with. You can feel the humanity emanating from these designs.
I have not yet acquired many manual illustration skills, but in recent years I have begun to integrate more noise and variation into my digital works. So, let’s talk a little about how I give things a little bit of an organic look while remaining in my comfortable realm of precise digital software.
While I’ll show some tools specific to my workflow in Adobe Illustrator, I am confident that these techniques could be applied to other programs. So, even if you don’t use the same software that I do, have a look through and brainstorm how you could implement these in your own workflow. And then please share your ideas with everyone in the comments!
Roughening and Brushing
Let’s start with some simple vector linework from Natural Earth. Here, we have some state boundaries made of straight line segments.
We can remove a bit of the digital look from this linework by rounding off those corners. Select the artwork, and then from the top menu bar in Illustrator, you can choose Effect → Stylize → Round Corners.
The exact value that you fill in the dialog box will vary based on your artwork size, so experiment around! The tool is admittedly a little finicky; sometimes some corners are rounded off by more or less than you might expect. If you want to change the value, just select your artwork and use the Appearance Panel to edit the effect. I won’t dive into it here, but the Appearance Panel is the very heart of Illustrator’s power and I’ve covered it in a few tutorials. Here’s what I ended up with:
The Round Corners tool ends up making your linework a bit softer. It’s particularly helpful when you have linework that is too coarse and generalized for your scale, but you don’t have the opportunity to use something more detailed. It can be a big help just to round off the big jagged edges that betray how simple your underlying vector geometry is. And if you’re not using Illustrator, have a look at smoothing tools in GIS. QGIS, for example, has a Smooth tool that will get you going in the right direction if you play with it.
It’s important to note that right now I’m using line features for state boundaries. If I instead had used polygon features, those corners would pull away from each other and leave weird gaps:
So, when you use this technique, make sure you’ve got line features that are split at intersections with other line features. The Round Corners tool doesn’t move the endpoints of lines; they stay in place, which means that the intersections remain clean.
Now, if we want things to look even more organic, let’s try another technique. We’re going to make the state edges wobble a bit using the Roughen tool, which adds random deviations in the line paths. To get started, select your lines and then choose Effect → Distort & Transform → Roughen.
There are a few things to fill in here. The Size lets you choose how big the wobbles can get, either Relative to the line segment’s width, or in Absolute width. I usually prefer to specify the latter; it’s just easier for me to understand. Detail asks you how often (per inch, oddly) the wobbles should occur. And finally, there’s a choice of whether the wobbles are smooth or have sharp corners. Obviously, the choices you make are going to vary a lot based on your individual design needs (and map scale), so experiment. Here I have made some subtle waves that feel organic without being too exaggerated:
If you’re doing this in GIS instead of Illustrator, I am less certain about how to add wobble, but your suggestions are welcome. Maybe break the line into component points, randomly shift them a bit, and then re-stitch them into a line?
A few important notes:
- Just like with Round Corners, you can change your settings by editing the effect in the Appearance Panel.
- The Roughen effect pretty much overrides the Round Corners effect. So, you don’t need to do both. But, I wanted to show you both options, so that you have a couple of different techniques in your pocket for the future.
- Unlike Round Corners, Roughen will potentially move the endpoints of your lines. If I zoom in close, you can see where the intersection of some state borders has gotten messed up:
- To fix this, you’d need to do some manual cleanup by dragging around the endpoints of your lines until things look good again, or change your settings to reduce the amount of wobble (or both). Or you could leave it! A misalignment could potentially be a part of a hand-made look. If you do decide to realign things, you might want to turn the Roughen effect into actual vector points by choosing Object → Expand Appearance. And if you don’t know what that means, that’s fine and it’s not necessary; we can perhaps talk about that in a future tutorial.
Now our formerly clean, precise linework is looking a little more interesting. Let’s give it one more round of adjustments. In hand-drawn maps, the lines not only wobble, but the line thickness can, too. A brush or pen might release a different amount of ink as the artist draws along the path. We can achieve this effect by applying a virtual brush in Illustrator.
You can open the Brushes panel by choosing Window → Brushes, and then click on the icon in the upper right of the panel and choose to create a New Brush. Illustrator has several types of brushes, and for this tutorial we’ll just look at what they call Calligraphic Brushes. Create a new one of those.
This is another panel full of options to experiment with, and I cannot tell you any parameters that will magically work with your individual design. Each one will require that you make different choices, so it’s important to take some time to understand how the brushes work.
We start with a circular brush. Here’s how a calligraphic brush works: imagine that this circle is going to be dragged along your vector path (such as our state borders), painting as it goes along its way. If I drag a circle along my path, it will simply create an ordinary stroke of the sort that we’re used to seeing.
But, we can change our brush using the angle, roundness, and size sliders. Let’s start with roundness (because angle won’t make sense until we change roundness). Dragging this slider makes our brush more of an oval. Now change the angle on that brush, and you can see it rotate around.
Now that we have an angled oval brush, it will drag along the paths to create a stroke that is uneven. Depending on the angle of the path, the stroke will change in thickness. The oval shape makes that possible, and the angle you choose will determine which parts of strokes are thick and which parts are thin, based on the angle they take on the canvas.
Next to each of our three parameters there’s a dropdown menu that says Fixed. If you click that you can change it to Random, and choose how much Variation to allow in the parameter. So, you can make a brush that has an angle or size that will change from time to time.
Once you’ve made a brush, you can simply select your artwork, and then go over to the brushes panel and click on the brush that you made (or one from the list of pre-made ones). You’ll also probably see in the panel some other types of brushes, non-calligraphic ones, which are worth looking into, but we won’t talk about those here. If you double-click on your brush, you can go back and change its parameters if you don’t like how it turned out.
By playing with calligraphic brush settings, I can give a little bit of variability to my example state boundaries, to make them look a little more inked. In general, you don’t want to overdo this. It’s tempting to want to show the map reader all the clever tricks you used, but these things usually work best if they’re subtle. The brush, combined with the random positional noise, makes my linework look much closer to hand-drawn than the Natural Earth default.
And remember, this is what our linework looked like before we applied these changes:
Project Linework
While we just used random noise and corner rounding to help make our vector paths a little more organic, there’s also another option. Instead of faking the shapes of hand-drawn linework, you could also just download some actual hand-drawn linework! The library of shapefiles and vector artwork at Project Linework is full of many interesting shapes for countries, states, landmasses, etc. Some of them are very angular, but others were drawn by hand (including ones that were actually digitized from paper drawings), so they have a casual, approachable wobbliness.
Project Linework offers its linework sets in shapefile format (among other options, including SVG), so it’s a great option if you want to keep everything in GIS. If you do go into Illustrator, though, you could always emphasize the hand-drawn feeling even more by applying a brush effect once again:
Uneven Patterns
Besides wobbling our linework, we can also add some variability to our pattern fills. I do a lot of monochrome (or other limited-palette) mapping, and that means that I often rely on patterns to help me create distinctions between features. These small repeating lines or symbols are easy enough to create in various GIS & graphics programs.
But, notice the change when I make the symbols vary a little in size, position, and rotation.
It’s a somewhat subtle change, but now everything feels a little more organic to my mind. It’s small enough that a reader must look carefully to be able to tell what’s actually going on. But (as has become the catchphrase for this blog): cartographic excellence inheres in the small details.
Let’s work through an example of how I wobble a pattern in Adobe Illustrator. First we’ll need a field of dots. You can start by drawing a circle (via the Ellipse tool, accessed by the shortcut L). If you hold shift while you click and drag, you’ll make a circle. Or, you can just left-click once after selecting the Ellipse tool, and you can then get an option to specify the exact size of the ellipse.
Now we’re going to copy this circle a few times. There are several ways to do this, so if you usually use a different way than the one I’m going to show you, that’s completely valid. Before we make circle copies, I first need to teach you above moving artwork with the arrow keys. If you’re not already familiar with this, try selecting the circle and pressing an arrow key on the keyboard. The circle will move in that direction. The amount that it moves could be a little, or a lot, depending on your settings (it may have even gone off the screen). You can change the distance it moves by updating your preferences. Hit Command-K or Control-K to access those.
At the top of the list of choices (of which there are many) is Keyboard Increment. This controls how far your arrow keys shift things. You can play around with this setting and see how much the circle moves. If you hold Shift, your circle will move 10 times the size of the keyboard increment, if you ever want to move something faster.
Now that you know how to change the keyboard increment, we can move on to the next step. Select the circle, and this time, hold Option/Alt when you press an arrow key. Instead of moving the circle a certain distance, you’ll create a copy of the circle that same distance away.
Now you can create a whole bunch of circles by holding Option/Alt and pressing arrow keys. They will be evenly spaced, and this spacing will be determined by your keyboard increment. I want to note that this is not the most efficient/fastest way to create a repeating pattern, but it does give me a chance to tell you about the keyboard increment, as well as the magic of copying things with the Option/Alt key, which I use constantly. That latter trick also works when you click and drag something, including not just artwork, but layers, color swatches, and more. Give it a try sometime.
Now that you have a dot grid, we can give it some wobble. We’re going to randomly adjust the position and the size of the dots. Select all the dots, and choose Object → Transform → Transform Each. You’ll see a dialog box like this:
Here we can (as the name suggests) transform our objects. We can resize them, or move them. Try plugging numbers into the sliders under Scale and Move. To begin, you’ll see all the dots change. After that, though, check the Random box in the lower right. You’ll now see a different amount of scale/move applied to each dot.
If you ask Illustrator to move a dot 10 points horizontally, and you choose Random, it will move each one some random amount up to 10 points. The best values for moving or resizing the dots will, as usual, vary based on your needs, so experiment with what looks good. Again, subtle is probably better, all other things being equal. Just a little variation in the pattern makes it feel more natural. If you do this to some other shape (such as the little crosses I used in my prior example), you can also use this same tool to Rotate them just a little bit.
If you ever want to make a pattern that doesn’t need to have its individual elements moved or resized, you should know that there is a much faster and easier method for making patterns that is built into Illustrator. But this tool doesn’t let you edit the individual pieces, so you’d have to go through the hassle of breaking the pattern apart afterwards, and that’s a task that’s a little more complicated than we should get into here. One option I use sometimes is to make a small field of symbols, vary them, and then turn that into a repeating pattern that I can then use to fill large areas.
Wrap-Up
Hopefully these techniques inspiration you to add a little bit of wobble to your maps! They are just a starting point, and worth exploring and practicing. And, while I’ve focused on one piece of software here, these are ideas that are worth applying to maps made in any software. So you have suggestions about how to do that, please share in a comment, so that others can learn!
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somethingaboutmaps 
Cartography is a fluid art, said Miss Dove.