About Maptorian

Maptorian is a vector map collection that was created for graphic designers, journalists, students, and any other people who may need to create visually appealing maps easily and quickly.

With Maptorian layered maps, anybody who knows how to handle a current vector graphic design program, especially a program like Illustrator, can easily shape their maps.

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Everything in Maptorian maps is editable. The distribution of thematic layers is designed to quickly create different types of maps through their activation and deactivation, change in distribution, and, of course, edition. Everything in Maptorian can be customized.

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Objects, layers, colors, texts… everything can be changed easily to create new maps. Also, to use Maptorian you only need to use your usual vector design program (Illustrator, Inkscape…) and you don’t need to know GIS programming or complex tools.


Why?

Map information is often out of reach for designers or graphic design program users. Would not it be great to have a collection of maps designed as templates to create new, customized maps not needing to use GIS or similar programs?

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That’s where Maptorian comes in. When creating this project, we always had in mind the ideal map pack in our daily work as graphic designers. Using Illustrator or any other popular vector design tool, you can create and edit any kind of map of the world, continent, country, or region, simply using what Maptorian has to offer.


Formats

Maps in AI format for Adobe Illustrator (CS3 or higher), fully editable and layered (the maps can also be imported and edited with graphic design programs such as Inkscape or Affinity Designer).


Layers

The magic behind Maptorian lies in its structure. All the maps have been designed to be easy to use. To achieve this goal, each map has several layers of information distributed on separate thematic layers.

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These layers can be turned on or off, you can edit them, copy and paste or even merge them. There are layers of rivers and lakes, of roads or railways, cities, text labels… Playing with the arrangement of the layers and the elements that compose them you can create countless maps, all of them meet your needs. Your imagination is the limit.


What for?

There is no limit to what you can do with Maptorian. We created this vector map pack thinking about the work of any graphic designer, Web designer, journalist or anyone else in need of creating maps quickly and very easily.

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Editing the layers of each of the maps of Maptorian can create thematic maps of the entire planet, extract silhouettes of countries, create visual representations for computer graphics or similar. It doesn’t matter if you want maps for print or web use, Maptorian maps adapt to all uses.

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Being built in vector formats, they can be scaled to any size without losing image quality. Therefore, you can create high-resolution maps for publishing even in a large size but you also can create maps for websites or interactive maps. Each point, text, line, or polygon is fully editable, so it becomes a cartographic toolbox easy to handle at your disposal.


The process

There are plenty of cartographic databases in the public domain in the world, but, unfortunately, they are typically designed for use by cartographers, engineers, and geographers who use for their projects GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. Generally, graphic designers, journalists, or anyone else outside the world of GIS often have great difficulty in handling these cartographic databases.

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When you need to create visually appealing maps and spatial analysis are not needed, these databases become a tempting target but, at the same time, a headache for those who lack GIS tools or the knowledge to take advantage of them.

Maptorian maps are created thinking in graphic design, in the visual, to communicate information easily. For this, Maptorian has been built with public domain cartographic databases, like Natural Earth, following as reference the CIA World Factbook and the National Atlas of the United States, from dumping of raw data into a GIS, later distributed in layers with Illustrator and handmade edition.

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Each vector object created this way has subsequently been edited: text labels, elements of color, lines, shapes, and other visual details. The result is a vector map pack created to have on hand several high-quality templates.


Who?

Maptorian has been created by Alejandro Polanco (mapmaker and graphic designer based in Spain).

Throughout the development of these maps it was possibly made some mistakes, and we appreciate any feedback if you locate one or if you have some kind of problem handling the maps.