Design process for building an interactive map

Design process for building an interactive map

Eloine

This isn’t really a tutorial of how to create an interactive map as this blog post would be way too long and too complex. It’s more about the process of taking various resources and putting them together to create something. As I write this post this map is a work in progress. View Demo

The first step was to create the map. This was mostly done taking a screen grab from a satellite view of our campus off of Google maps. Then the buildings were traced using the pen too for each panel and curve. Shading was applied to give the buildings a 3D look.

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For masthead where the text looks like chalkboard type I used the rough texture of paper overlay into white type. I then outlined the type and the arrow that I drew with a rough brush.

The map below is using several different technologies.

  • Image maps to make hot regions using Adobe Dreamweaver to define the coordinates on mouse hover.

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Google drive forms

Eloine

I’ve posted before about Google docs (now called Google drive) but I had to post again because they sure have made my life so much easier!

Doing web forms from scratch can be a time consuming process to make and with Google’s easy form creation tool you can have a working feedback form that collects data in a spreadsheet in a matter of minutes for free!

The draw back is you don’t have a lot of control over the placement of some of the fields. For example if you want to make your form two column you have to get back into trying to do some code hacks so you might as well do another method than Google forms.

You can however control the width of the form that you can then embed in your web page. What I have done here is dress it up with one of my photos. This helps make the web page not so boring with a static form. Make a form and assign it the width of half the page and then drop an image behind either in a table background or as a background DIV tag and you’re done!

 

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Earth day graphics

Eloine

Just sharing a couple graphics that I made recently for the upcoming earth day on April 22nd. One is for a plant sale and another is an awareness event put on my a sustainability committee. I used some clip are and did a lot merging.

The font I used for the writing on the pot is called “chalkboard” Kinda obvious huh?

For the image below I used puppet warp to get the ground to wrap around the earth and spherized filter to bloat the text a little. I made a selection of the text on the earth and then inverted the colors and overlaid the green color. There is kind of a dark quality to it that I think tells a little story about earth day or consequences of not caring about the earth.

 

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Double duty bokashi composting

Eloine

I have share a little garden update success. I’ve been doing bokashi composting (rapid composting) for a little while now and developed a routine that I thought I would share.

Bokashi is a method of composting that is basically fermenting kitchen waste with a mixture called EM-1 and then burying it in the ground to finish the composting cycle in about 28 days. It can vary of course according to the weather – in winter it takes longer than in the Summer but it’s safe to say when digging the soil back up after 28 days most of the kitchen material will be gone and you’ll have rich black fluffy soil in its place. (read an article about bokashi here).

The advice is to dig a trench in the backyard and bury it at least 8 inches deep after it has fermented. The deeper the better and given  I have birds and thick heavy clay soil I opted for another way of doing it.

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