Eaux Claires Music Festival

Independent Cartography

During my independent cartography student-faculty directed study, I designed the reference map for the 2018 Eaux Claires festival along with a fellow geography student, Zach Fischer. The annual indie music festival held in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, draws in a crowd of over 20,000 people per day and is organized by the popular artist and UWEC alum, Justin Vernon.

Working closely with the official print shop for Eaux Claires, Ambient Inks, we created an accurate festival grounds map in the style of the event graphics. We designed the map for printing in small, black and white field books and for large, colorful banners placed around the festival grounds. The map was also used for the Eaux Claires app.

To create the map, we first traced the trails from a Google Maps satellite image using Adobe Illustrator. However, we could not identify the trails hidden in the forest, so we traveled to the festival grounds to map the paths ourselves. At the site, we used our phones to plot GPS points at important trail vertexes and imported the points into the computer. The background pattern was constructed by Zach and I using graphics provided by the Eaux Claires team, and the trees were drawn using the Illustrator pen tool. We used simple squares and circles to symbolize places of interest and created the main stages using the 3D effect tool.

Designing this map was a learning experience. Zach and I taught ourselves how to manage an Adobe Illustrator file with many layers, images, and intricate patterns. We created a visual hierarchy of map elements and formatted it for easy reading in multiple mediums. All in all, through designing the Eaux Claires grounds map, I improved my graphic design skills and gained professional experience working with a high-profile client.