Pen Weights

Illustrator allows us to create lines of any thickness — referred to as weight. Technical pens come in several different weights, but using too many line weights on a technical drawing creates visual confusion. We want each line weight we use to have a job: defining edges, filling areas, or drawing fine details. Usually 3–5 weights are sufficient to describe the kind of drawing we are trying to emulate.

Illustrator works comfortably in points (1/72”) which are a legacy unit from typography. Technical pens come in weights measured in millimeters, which is the unit nearly everyone in the world uses. I’m an old American, so I use points.

Scale

Closely related to line weight is scale. I draw my maps using a 1/4” grid. This simulates the graph paper of my youth, and the conventions of D&D. Since Illustrator allows us to scale, we’ll be able to freely change the size of our drawing once it’s drawn, but we do want our line weights to relate to our scale. It’s useful to work with Illustrator’s grid turned on so that you can make sure your scale and line weights make sense together.

Rounded Ends and Corners

Pens have round tips, which means that our lines should have rounded ends and our corners should meet with a small radius. Lines shouldn’t taper to razor points that our hypothetical markers couldn’t achieve. Stipple dots should be roughly consistent in size, as if they are all dots from the same pen.

Introduce Imperfection

A skilled drafter with technical pens and straight edges can produce nearly perfect lines — and Illustrator certainly can. But that is not the look we’re going for. We want to simulate a meticulous freehand map, and we need to think about the imperfections that will create this effect. In general, we don’t want perfectly straight lines, and we don’t want our corners to be too crisp. We will cover several line types and techniques we can use to introduce these imperfections.

Black on White, Not White on Black

Illustrator makes it easy to put any color anywhere. We could easily place tiny white dots on a black background, or cross a black field with a narrow white line. However, ink pens cannot easily accomplish this, so we’ll make sure our styles simulate this limitation.