And that’s it! All overlapping objects from all child layers will dynamically be merged together and outlined with an additional stroke. So still in the Appearance settings of our container layer, we add another effect: Pathfinder → Merge. Your map should look something like this …Īll objects have the outlines we want, but they are not merged yet. In this case, this even works for strokes, since we have applied the “Outline Stroke effect” before, which basically turns all outlines dynamically to filled objects. Now you can add a new outline as layer style in the Appearance panel which will be applied to the outlines of all objects on our child layers. Click on the circle beside the name of our parent layer in the Layer panel. This new layer will be used to create the outline around all objects in the child layers. Now assign all these layers to a parent layer. all street layers), open the Appearance panel and add an effect: Path → Outline Stroke. In every layer where you used outlines (e.g.
This makes styling, editing and selecting much easier. If you have different kinds of roads, I would recommend to put each category on one separate layer. And guess what, that’s actually possible and pretty easy to achieve - all we need to to is to combine two layer effects.įirst, draw your streets and put them on a layer. What we really want is that Illustrator would take all our streets (usually drawn as outlines) and squares (usually drawn as fills), merge them together dynamically and draw an outline around it. More creative solutions used layer transparency settings so the overlaying outlines would knock each other out or simply cover the unwanted overlaps with even more outlines laid on top with layer styles …īut all these methods are work-arounds and have their flaws. But that would make later changes to the maps much harder or even impossible. Mostly they required an additional step, like combining all paths to one object or copying all paths to another layer and style those paths individually. I checked a lot of online mapping tutorials, but the ones which mentioned this effect recommended rather cumbersome methods to achieve it. Maybe that is because there is no direct option which would allow the user to “outline an outline”. But this effect is not as often used for vector maps drawn in vector illustration apps like Illustrator. I always liked this special effect of online mapping services like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, where roads are outlined but still reveal their connections.
But not every map looks equally convincing. A simple and effective way how to automatically merge and outline streets in maps drawn in Adobe Illustrator.ĭrawing maps is a typical job of graphic designers and pretty much every designers knows how to do it.
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