From the course: InDesign Secrets

382 Free, high-quality maps in vector format - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

382 Free, high-quality maps in vector format

- [Instructor] Everyone needs to make a map sooner or later. Maybe a detailed street map or a map of where Austria is in Europe or something. But there's one thing that all maps have in common, they're a total pain to draw. But I'm here to show you a way to make maps that is super easy, super powerful, and actually kind of fun. The trick is to use a free plugin called ArcGIS Maps for Creative Cloud. And actually it won't run inside of InDesign, but it does run inside of Illustrator. So I'm going to switch over to Illustrator and to find this plugin you just need to go to the Window menu and then choose Find Extensions on Exchange. That takes you to the Adobe Exchange Marketplace where you can just search for maps and ArcGIS will show up here, from there you can just click on its name and then you'll see a Free button to install it. Yes this is totally free. Anyway, I've already installed this so it says Acquired. So now I'm going to switch back to Illustrator and you can find it here in the Window menu under the Extensions sub menu, there it is ArcGIS Maps. Now I can't give you a full tutorial on how all of this works but I'll give you the quick version, first you find the location you want, like I'm going to search for Palo Alto, California. Then I need to draw out a rectangle to show the extent of the map that I want. You give it a name and click OK. And when the map is looking just the way you want, you can click this little Preview button here. That opens this other panel, the Compilation panel and here's where you get to say what you want in the map. Right now it's a topographic map, which is just a bit mapped image, but I want actual vector art, so I'm going to click on this little menu over here and set the base map to Vector Street Map. Then I click the download or sync button here and it gives me this warning which I'm just going to ignore. And then it starts to download the data. Now this could take a while depending on how much data there is. Then, once it's done you'll see this little success message. So now I can go ahead and close those panels and there's the map inside of Illustrator. But here's where it gets really awesome, because look at my Layers panel. Oh my gosh look at all of those layers. And that means I can turn off some of those layers to simplify the map. Like I don't need all of these labels in here. You can see how much control you have here. Also remember these are just vector paths in Illustrator, so you can change their color, edit them, change the font of the labels, whatever you want. Then, when you're done save this as a pdf or an AI file and place it in your InDesign document. So you're probably asking, why did the mapping company that makes this called ESRI E-S-R-I why did they release this incredible tool for free? Well because while this does everything most of us need, some companies, especially the large enterprise and government organizations that ESRI works with, they need even more map and demographic data, so ESRI is giving this free tool to everyone because they know a few of you work for big companies who can afford their more advanced or in-depth mapping tools. I love it when I discover this kind of win-win where I can get an awesome tool for free. You should definitely check this out.

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