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Hello guys, I have been doing cartography for fantasy authors and gamers. Until now, I have been using Inkarnate and Wonderdraft for maps. Currently learning how to use Affinity Photo for that. While I have been using specialized cartography brushes, I have been wondering about where I can get brushes to indicate grasslands, deserts, etc. Like the brushes and textures Inkarnate has. I have created colored maps using Affinity Photo, but I'd like to know if there are some premade texture brushes I can use for grasslands, deserts, barren plains, etc instead of simple colored maps. Yes, I can play around with blending and everything, but if any brushes are available, that'd be wonderful and it would make my job easier and faster. Any leads? Do let me know. Thank you very much in advance.

Illustrated maps for village promotion and tourist places. Created in Affinity Designer using vector technique combined with bitmap using Concept Master Vol.1: Nature Brush Pack brushes and those created by myself. So far, for several maps, I have drawn about 200 objects with varying degrees of accuracy.

Are there any cartography resources for Affinity Designer? I'm specifically looking for patterns or brushes or anything that can turn a polygon into a nice looking forest, or do some nice water waves along a coastline of a land polygon, or make a polygon look like grass, plains, hills, swamp/marsh, etc. Thanks

I'm curious if anyone else out there is using Affinity products for making maps? These days , probably >95% of cartographers make their maps almost entirely within GIS software, but I was always frustrated by the limited options and lack of precision for controlling stylistic elements on maps in those software suites (both QGIS and ArcGIS), so I figured why not outsource the styling to Affinity products For those unfamiliar, mapmaking is not unlike standard graphic design. You have a document comprised of a bunch of different layers, some of which can be vector (like road lines, point data, etc.) and some of which can be raster (like elevation maps, aerial imagery, etc.). The only real difference is they are all encoded with spatial information. So what I started doing is using the GIS software just to compile and size (spatially aware trim/crop) all my different layers of geographic data, and then exporting a bunch of identically-sized layers that I then reassemble in AD / AP (i.e export a PDF of *just* the road lines, export another PDF of *just* the water body polygons, export a PNG of *just* the aerial imagery, etc.). As long as I maintain identical pixel dimensions for the exported raster layers, and identical aspect ratios for the vector layers, maintaining the appropriate map scale / size and reassembling the layers in AD/AP is trivial. Once I have all the data in AD/AP, I can take advantage of those graphic design features that GIS software could never hope to do, like advanced masking and layer blending modes, brush-based editing, pixel-perfect label placement (HUGE), etc. Another great thing is this method gives you ultimate control over design of the map frame and you're not stuck using the preset layouts and scalebars that are baked into GIS software suites. The included example is a map I made for my mother last Christmas of the area where her ancestors settled 150ish years ago. Its sort of like a modern take on the classic USGS topo map styles from the 50's-80's. (there are two typos I'm aware of, 'prairie' is misspelled in both instances, and 'convenience' is written as 'convenient' in the legend... if you see anymore, let me know!) cheers

Greetings, Can someone please help me with creating a specific type of cartographic line symbol (picture included)? The issue is that the curves will be be have asymmetrical stroke weight on top and bottom so it's not as simple as crating overlapping curves of different weights and colors. I tried by converting the stroke to a shape using Layer > Expand Stroke and them to delete the lines at the caps, thus leaving two lines that run perfectly "parallel" which I can edit individually. The issue is that you cannot delete a the end caps as such. Perhaps there is another method someone can teach me? (See attached picture) Thanks ahead of time for the help!

We do a fair amount of cartography and while my boss *hates* Adobe, and loves Affinity Designer, he is currently trapped because he uses Avenza's Map Publisher (http://www.avenza.com/mapublisher). I realize that its a plug in FOR Illustrator (and Avenza plans to deprecate support for all but CC in the next release) but he would hate to have to "subscribe" to CC just to use this one plug-in. So, the request is simply "Can you reach out to Avenza and see about getting a version of their Map Publisher plug-in built for AD?" I think this addition would bring a good number of cartographers over to the AD side and away from the CC side :)

Just trying out AD... Have been drawing maps for twenty years in FreeHand. As now on OSX 10, no FreeHand :( . Can't get on with Illustrator and hate the idea of paying Adobe every month so thought I would have a play. So attached my first quick draft. Really like AD, very quick to pick up. Somethings that did not jump out at me, a quick look on YouTube and job done. So far, only a couple of items missing that are essential to allow me to migrate fully: Text on a path. Essential for road names going around a curve especially if inside the text is inside the path. Dotted lines - wanted the footpaths to be dotted but no joy. Otherwise looking good and reading the forums, these items are on the roadmap - thanks AD Couple of things notice that are an issue but not deal breakers (unless I missed it): Only single page documents allowed. Fonts, quite a few of my fonts such as Zapf Dingbats, WebDings and FontAwesome not rendering - just getting square text boxes. Anyway - looking good Serif Suitably impressed