On the Sustainable City project mentioned below, a close up floor plan of City Hall was required to illustrate how a municipality need to allocate political resources and energy toward building a more sustainable community. Randal did a floor plan of a typical City hall building to illustrate the office space dedicated to a city sustainability manager.
City Hall Floor Plan
Through a web search, Randal was contacted by Idea Engineering out in Santa Barbara, California about doing a map for their client, the Home Depot Foundation. Through email communication, a project scope, fee and timeline was established. The objective of the project was to create a generic city map that could be used on a website to highlight various “green” and “sustainable” features that Home Depot Foundation promotes as good city planning and public policy.
Based upon the resources that Idea Engineering and Home Depot furnished, Randal first created a digital “pencil” of the line art for “The Sustainable City” map. This pencil was created using Corel Painter software, running on a MacBook Pro, using a pen stylus on a Wacom Intuos3 Tablet.
This linework file was reviewed approved by Idea Engineering and Home Depot Foundation so that Randal could then continue the digital map illustration process.
This is the final illustration as delivered to the client. The line art was kept on a layer by itself floating above a base layer used to paint digital watercolor and pencil shading that gives the map its dimensional and textured look. The developers of a new website will use this map to highlight various areas to provide greater detail and content about:
When the final client website goes live, I’ll add a link to the finished product.
Randal's MacBook Pro, Extra Monitor, Corel Painter, Wacom Stylus and Tablet setup
Randal did this vector digital illustration in Adobe Illustrator for Ameritech’s “Signals” magazine in the 1980′s. It demonstrates how their wireless technology can penetrate walls and windows in buildings giving customers better cell signal reception.
Ameritech Signals Magazine - Diagram
This diagram was created by Randal in Adobe Illustrator as vector art for an engineering client who manufactures prefabricated vertical drain remediation systems. It has a cutaway section showing how the system looks and works below ground, as well as how it is laid out above ground. These systems help prevent groundwater contamination, as well as help clean up contamination when it does occur. Unlike bitmapped or “raster art,” vector art can be scaled to any size without losing any resolution.
Prefabricated Vertical Drain Remediation System
Kodak was a sponsor of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. They wanted to give visitors a handy map of places to visit in the Atlanta area. Randal created this forced aerial perspective map to highlight a number of sites and locations.
Atlanta Summer Olympics Map for Kodak
Randal Birkey was contracted by the Memphis Arts Council in the 1980’s to create a fun map for use in a promotional poster. The map was intended to highlight a number of locations in the city where arts related activities and events were being promoted. Randal worked from maps, drawings and aerial photo references of the city to create this “rounded earth” forced perspective view. In each location, one single element was selected and exaggerated to communicate the basic art events: music, dance, theater, etc.
Randal used a cutting edge software product at the time called Fractal Painter, running on a Macintosh computer with a Wacom tablet. This image was produced entirely digitally with nothing scanned or hand drawn on traditional paper surfaces. The final image file was delivered to the customer via email, and the printer went directly to CMYK film separations and printing plates from the file. It was reproduced in 4-color offset printing as a fold out poster.
Memphis Arts Council - Aerial Perspective Map
Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, has recruited Randal on several occasions to create or update various campus maps. This is an example of a mechanical or vector line art version created in Adobe Illustrator. This style of map is very easy to update and make changes to because of the vector nature of Postscript, the graphics language that Adobe Illustrator uses.
Wheaton College Campus Map
Dodge Viper
Randal created this automobile illustration of a Dodge Viper as a self promotion portfolio piece, mainly because he really likes that design of this automobile. It is reminiscent of the AC Cobra design by Carroll Shelby, another car favorite of Randal’s. It was done in Adobe Illustrator.
Randal created this concept car illustration in Adobe Illustrator using a Apple Macintosh and Wacom tablet. It is what it is.
Concept Car - Automotive Illustration
Atlantic City, New Jersey - Map Illustration
This preliminary city map was illustrated in Adobe Illustrator by Randal Birkey and intended for use to sell advertising to the businesses in that city. It featured all the major casinos, and shopping spots as a means to attract additional businesses to advertise on the map. Each new business would have their building and location added in 3D to the map, to match the other buildings. A key to the advertisers and additional ad space was to be added to the outside edge of this map.
Detail Area of the Atlantic City Map
The style of this map is called an axonometric projection. To create this, the 2D base map is rotated off axis (North is in the upper right corner), which allows for the building to be projected in a 3D fashion, straight up vertically from the base. The advantage is that the base map is still to scale and can be used for relatively accurate distances.