Estimate - Design - Creation - Feedback - Revision - Delivery

Our cartographic work with you is initiated by a map estimate, based upon what you envision and tailored to exceed your needs. From there, we begin work in the most complicated phase: map design. Everything begins, and ends, with the design phase for many reasons. We build our custom map product around your ideas, which may initially be an anorexic skeleton, but it's our responsibility to wrap it in tendons and muscle, flesh, and eventually a pair of really sharp clothes. Our goal is to do this once, but we'll repeat it until we get it right - while maintaining your timeline. To do this effectively often takes 60% of our time. When we design, we don't just think about colors of your map, but how you and your client will interact with our product and how it will be able to achieve your needs in the future, we research data to confirm its appropriateness, and of course, we create the maps' framework for how we'll proceed.

Next, we create. Most often the map product's infancy is in a state-of-the-art geographic information system (GIS), from which it progresses into a handful of graphic design applications. If needed, we'll use specialized terrain modeling software, database solutions, and reverse integrate it all back into a GIS.

Once everything begins to take shape, we'll deliver soft-copy map proofs to be checked by your staff. Your feedback on our maps at this stage is invaluable, and assures us that we aren't just heading in the right direction, but we're getting you excited. We take your input, and we engineer that into the map, changing angles and dimensions, viewpoints and colors.

Throughout the mapping process our products go through stringent quality control measures. We cross compare our information to other map sources for accuracy and validity, and we reference our design mandates, balancing those with your feedback.

Depending on your timeline, we might repeat this a few times, shaping and polishing. At the least, we guarantee two rounds of map revisions on all of our products. On final delivery, we know you'll be happy with your custom map from Cartisan Maps.