Happy Thursday, friends!
Writing this newsletter is a nice break from the low-level panic of job interviews this week. I’m excited they’re happening, but also… deeply terrified. Is that normal, or just me? Anyway, time for our ChitChart!
Let me show you some maps I made last year about mussels. I have a bit of a thing for invasive species: what they are, how they got here, how they mess with ecosystems (and us), all of it. So I’ll take any excuse to write about or visualize them.
For this project, I mapped where zebra and quagga mussels show up and used that to tell the story of how they spread across the U.S. I also got to play around with a version of my Dormidots pattern, but made the shapes feel more mussel-y—less perfect circles, more pointy little shells.
Here’s a gift link to the Washington Post story if you’d like to read the whole piece.
By Hannah Dormido, originally published in The Washington Post
Here are four things from the process I wanted to share:
1. I made the patterns in Adobe Fresco.
My instinct is usually to use pen and paper because I haven’t quite mastered digital illustration, but for this one, I used my iPad and Adobe Fresco. This app allows you to export vectors, which is useful if I want to edit them in Illustrator later.
Here’s a peek into my Adobe Fresco file.
2. I played with layers.
The base of this map consists of three layers: an effects layer to overlay on the map, a watercolor paper texture, and a pencil map base by my editor, Tim Meko. All styling was done in Photoshop and Illustrator.
Three layers I styled together for the map base.
3. I used a font of my own handwriting for the labels.
Handwriting fonts don’t always work, but sometimes a map really calls for them. They add a bit more personality and also a sense of rawness, like when one writes their notes on paper, which feels right here. The data shows ranges, because scientists can’t count every mussel (they would love to, but it’s impossible), so it’s not super exact.
The font had to be vectorized (expanded in Illustrator) so it would work with ai2html.
Originally, I wanted to just write everything by hand (on paper or my iPad) and then scan or export it. But turning my handwriting into a font made editing way more efficient. I used Calligraphr to create it. It’s not an exact replica of my handwriting, but it’s good enough!
4. I made four versions of this map to make it responsive online.
We use ai2html to make our graphics responsive to your screen size. Even if you only see one version, each graphic is carefully designed and optimized to work across a range of devices. That means extra work on the reporting side (in this case, mine), but it ensures a better experience for our readers.
A peek into my Illustrator file.
I plan to make a social media reel going into more detail about this map and the process. When that’s ready (I’m honestly unsure when), I’ll let you know! I hope this demystified the process a little bit for you. 🙂
WHO TO FOLLOW 📲
Really, this section is just me sharing favorites and recommending people to follow. If you love maps, you’re missing out if you don’t follow @nacismakesmaps on Instagram. It’s the official account of the North American Cartographic Information Society. I’m a little biased: I love maps, I love the people behind them, and I’m the past president (serving my last year on the four-year presidential track).
If you’d like to share visual stories that caught your eye, send me good vibes while I job hunt, or—if you are hiring 🙂—please reach out! You can reply to this newsletter or email me at [email protected].
ChitChart soon,
Hannah