Themepark style maps

[ChrisCrabtree]

Hello all!

I work for small county / city government. I'm the GIS administrator and I'm used to make professional maps and now I've been asked to make theme park styled map for special events and more specifically a Christmas parade next week. I know this isn't really a GIS type question since nothing on the map itself will be referenced to anything and will be a complete cartographic mess, but the city is wanting a fun map for children that represents the parade route and local amenities.

I assumed some other GIS Professionals had been put in the same spot for local government. I've looked into using ArcGIS, but it doesn't seem practical for this type application. I've looked into SimCity products and even online city building games, so my question is, ha anyone had experience using any type of software that can do this?

Thanks!

[KyleBalke__GISP]

Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop are probably the most widely used to generate these type of maps and take a considerable amount of time to produce (i.e., more than a week).  SketchUp might be an option as well to do some of the work.

Good luck.

[MikeCusi]

had an almost similar request a while back and i used arcscene to create a 3d perspective view of the main points of interest and the road that  were all geographically correct. exported it out as an Illustrator file (.ai), added clip art on top of the points of interest, "sketched" by mouse the road then added the cosmetics and text. I did have an artist finish it off as I am not very good with that.

[NealJohnston]

I would also reccomend Sketchup if you wanted to use some 3D visualisations. Otherwise open source software like GIMP has a bit of GIS functionality and a lot of image processing and manipulation which could help with making it more attractive for kids to read.

Hope that is helpful

[ChrisCrabtree · Accepted solution]

I know it's been a long time since I posted on this thread. I ended up going with icograms. They have templates you can use and if you pay you can export high quality maps. 

Thanks everyone.