Here at Old-Maps.com, we love to make custom maps of lakes and coastlines from all over the United States. We started with the states that make up New England, and from there we expanded our collection to the rest of the country. Recently we have been going through the southeast region, looking for lakes that we could still make, and to our surprise, there are so many more lakes that the southeast has to offer!
This past month alone, I made 32 custom topographic lake maps from the state of Florida. I'm going to show you the process that I use for constructing all of our custom topographic lake maps, using the map of Lake Monroe (seen above) as an example.
First, I start by doing some research into some of the most popular lakes in that state. The lakes that locals and tourists love to visit for fishing, boating, or camping. I then look up the lakes on the United States Geological Society (USGS) database, where the whole country is mapped out in quadrangle maps or "quads". These quads are open to the public and free to use, and come in various scale sizes and years.
This is a 1965 quad named Sanford at 1:24,000 scale which is the largest scale the USGS works with. This scale shows great detail that you don't often see with a road map or atlas map. Notice how it includes parts of the City of Sanford and Lake Monroe. It is hard to see, but these quads are actually trapezoids! I have to slightly stretch the top corners outwards to make them rectangular. Once I do that, I can stitch them together in Photoshop to make what we call a "combo" like this:
This combo is 4 quads stitched together. I add the names and dates of each quad for the index so we always know which quads we used for each map. Some combos I have made included up to 40 quads!
From the combo, I can crop out my desired area for the map and add a border to make the "custom final" (like the image at the top of this post). Custom Finals are what we refer to as the files that we print from in the office. They have the highest possible resolution to make sure the printed product comes out looking at good as it can get. Here are some closeups of the Lake Monroe map at full size:
The original size of the custom final is 22" x 27" - a pretty descent size! This map looks amazing as a 24 x 30 inch print, but it can go bigger and not loose much detail.
Once I make a set of combos for a state, I place all of them onto a larger map as an index to see where each combo is located relative to the whole state.
With this index, I can see what lakes I have made and what still needs to be done. As you can see, I still have some areas of Florida to look into!
Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out all of the new custom topographic maps that I make over at old-maps.com!
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