Easy Data-Driven Bubble Maps in Adobe Illustrator
Transcript
alright so we just finished tutorial
that involves making a bubble map on the
hard way and this is a tutorial on how
to make bubble maps the easy way so if
you aren't paying attention last time a
bubble map is a map where you have
circles on a map and a circle is its
size is related to the value that it
represents so we have la right here
sitting California very very large we
have a city called Eureka up here
there's very few people in Eureka so it
has a very small circle san francisco
here moderate amount of people
moderately sized circle so in order to
do this we did all kinds of stuff we use
the ellipse tool over here we held down
shift make it a circle we held down alt
to make it come out of the center we
calculated how big the diameter of all
these circles would be using Excel there
was all kinds of intermediate steps it
was just it was very complicated and
prone to error so now that you know the
reason why all of those things had to
happen we're going to go back and we're
going to remake this map in a very very
very easy way so let's get rid of all
these circles let's get rid of all this
text cuz we won't need it and just will
take a peek real quick I still have a
map underneath my SVG map that I will
use to reference here in San Francisco
here's la here San Diego here's Fresno
all those cities that I don't actually
know where they are so one of the tools
that we've used a couple times is the
pie graph tool so if this is a column
graph tool here for you click and hold
go down to pie graphs normally a no
one's ever allowed to use pie graphs but
B there's kind of an annoying thing that
the pie graph tool does let's say we're
going to make a graph of pet ownership
in the US vs canada so we have the u.s.
we have canada we're only going to do
exotic animals so maybe some llamas
maybe some of porcupine
maybe a alpaca even though that's
basically the llama so in the US let's
say 1,000 people have llamas let's say
you know 2,500 people have porcupines
and let's say three thousand people have
alpacas Canada though they're not as
into all of these animals only 50 people
have llamas a thousand people have
porcupines and you know 600 people have
alpacas we're going to hit apply here
and we're going to have two charts get
made the US vs canada normally this is
the point where i get very angry because
why is the US pine bigger than the
canada pie well it's because overall
there are more people who own these
exotic animals in the u.s. than own
these exotic animals in Canada so
illustrator tries to do as a favor and
makes the Canadian pie smaller generally
what I have you do is you close this
window here you right-click you go to
type and then you change your position
it was it ratio and you change it to
even so there's going to be an even size
for every single one of your graphs but
luckily we can use this for our bubble
charts to automatically sighs all of our
bubbles because the number of people pet
owners in the USA is larger than the
number of pet owners in Canada and so
when if we go back through undo look at
our data again it's because these
numbers here are larger than these
numbers here that USA is bigger than
Canada so let's take advantage of that
let's get rid of all this and go into
Excel all right so now we're in Excel
and we have our data here we have our
city and we have our population and
we're just going to cut and paste that
into the data box here we're going to
hit apply
and hey look at that la San Diego San
Francisco Fresno Sacramento Eureka we
can't really read it but it's a small
price to pay so what has happened is
illustrator has taken all of these
population numbers and done all that
hard work for us of resizing each of
these circles based on the area that
they should be taking up so life is good
now all we need to do is maybe make this
text a little bit more readable so we
know which cities were working with move
the cities to the places they belong and
then resize them to be saying aye sir
sighs so the first thing we will do is
we're going to go grab our white
selection tool and we're going to select
all of the text so you can either click
and drag and grab all the text or you
can hold down alt and then click twice
and it will select all the text now
we're just going to make the font size a
little bit smaller so we can see which
cities were working with if we try to do
any of the stuff we're doing right now
with the selection tool the black arrow
the black pointer it'll just grab the
entire graph at the same time which will
not allow us to do much of anything so
white selection to a white selection to
a wide selection tool so now we're going
to move each of these cities to the
place that they belong we're going to
turn on our underlay map so we know
where all of these cities are first
we're going to take Los Angeles we're
going to move it down here we're going
to take San Diego we're going to move it
down there San Francisco oh look what's
happening so because this circle is kind
of small instead of grabbing the middle
of the circle what I ended up doing was
it just grabbing one edge of the circle
and then pulling that down so we're
going to undo that and for this one I'm
just going to try to grab in the black
area so they're moving a successful grab
in the black area again don't let any of
those anchors show up any of those white
boxes avoid them like the plague and
Sacramento is our last one nope
Eureka now if you try to grab Eureka it
you will always just get the edges so
what you can do is is if you select all
of it like that tah-dah in of Eureka so
I'll do it one more time if you have a
circle that's very small just click and
drag with the white selection tool and
now the whole thing will be selected and
even click and drag it all the way over
to where it belongs great look at these
wonderful wonderful cities alright so
now all we have to do is get rid of
these labels get rid of this legend and
resize these bubbles to be the size that
we want them to be but first a little
bit of housekeeping so we made a mistake
in that we put our graph inside of our
state layer so I have another layer
that's specifically for City bubbles
I'll actually get rid of it I'll create
a new one click down here create new
layer a double click I'm going to call
it City bubbles and then I'm going to
drag my graph into the city bubbles
layer we have to do this now because
once we make this stop being a graph
it's going to create all kinds of
circles of text and we won't have to we
don't have to deal with those so what
we're going to do is first we want to
delete all the things on the graph that
we don't like so we don't need all these
labels anymore going to delete the
labels we don't need this legend anymore
going to delete the legend oh look at
that saying we can't remove it because
it's still a graph so what we're going
to have to do is make this stop being a
graph so grab your black selection tool
click anything on here anything on the
magraph you go to object on group you
get a very scary warning the warning
will say if the graph is ungrouped you
won't be able to access its style its
data or change its graph designs and you
say I don't care so yes that sounds
wonderful to me and you can see that
inside of City bubbles you now have a
few different group
that contain all sorts of stuff so these
groups are actually going to cause us
trouble and a little bit but first let's
see why they're going to cause us
trouble because you might run into this
issue later so first we're going to take
the white selection tool and we're going
to delete this population bit up here
and now we're going to attempt to resize
all of these circles so because they're
in a group you can just click them with
the black selection tool you could also
use the white selection tool hold down
alt and then click one of them twice and
you'll get all of these selected
normally when we want to make things
bigger we use the scale tool if we use
the scale tool in this situation by
double clicking and saying uniform two
hundred percent we want them to be twice
as big unfortunately all of our bubbles
end up moving and the reason why they
end up moving is because the scale tool
operates as if you were pulling on one
of these edges here and so not only does
it make all of the bubbles bigger or
smaller it also pushes them farther
apart or closer together just like we
were resizing the entire image so that
is not what we want to have happened we
want each of these individually to get
bigger what you would normally do or
what we will end up doing is using
something called transform each so if
you go to transform transform each we
can change these numbers here and it
will transform each one of these circles
on its own but if we preview it it's
doing the same thing as scale and that's
because we need to ungroup more and more
and more so once you have all of these
selected go to object on group object
ungroup object ungroup keep on grouping
until there is no other ungroup option
there so now none of these bubbles are
connected to each other except for the
fact that we have all of them selected
so now we're going to go
transform transform each we're going to
click preview down here so we can see
what we're doing and then we're just
going to adjust these numbers until
there's something that we think is
reasonably good let me 320 looks pretty
good we want to make sure horizontal and
vertical are the same just so that these
keep staying as circles instead of
becoming ellipses so we're going to hit
okay we're going to have our nice
bubbles we can make them transparent we
could make if you click right here this
little circle over here on the right
hand side of city bubbles we can make
the opacity for every single one of them
all at the same time be forty percent by
selecting opacity up here or if we just
select each of them using this little
select tool over here we can change
their individual opacity to be forty
percent so that when there is a little
bit of overlap you can see oh you know
San Diego is moving into Los Angeles so
even though this tutorial took almost as
long as the other tutorial because of
the fact that all you need to do is cut
and paste your data into the pie graph
tool it is a far easier way to make your
bubble graphs good luck
that involves making a bubble map on the
hard way and this is a tutorial on how
to make bubble maps the easy way so if
you aren't paying attention last time a
bubble map is a map where you have
circles on a map and a circle is its
size is related to the value that it
represents so we have la right here
sitting California very very large we
have a city called Eureka up here
there's very few people in Eureka so it
has a very small circle san francisco
here moderate amount of people
moderately sized circle so in order to
do this we did all kinds of stuff we use
the ellipse tool over here we held down
shift make it a circle we held down alt
to make it come out of the center we
calculated how big the diameter of all
these circles would be using Excel there
was all kinds of intermediate steps it
was just it was very complicated and
prone to error so now that you know the
reason why all of those things had to
happen we're going to go back and we're
going to remake this map in a very very
very easy way so let's get rid of all
these circles let's get rid of all this
text cuz we won't need it and just will
take a peek real quick I still have a
map underneath my SVG map that I will
use to reference here in San Francisco
here's la here San Diego here's Fresno
all those cities that I don't actually
know where they are so one of the tools
that we've used a couple times is the
pie graph tool so if this is a column
graph tool here for you click and hold
go down to pie graphs normally a no
one's ever allowed to use pie graphs but
B there's kind of an annoying thing that
the pie graph tool does let's say we're
going to make a graph of pet ownership
in the US vs canada so we have the u.s.
we have canada we're only going to do
exotic animals so maybe some llamas
maybe some of porcupine
maybe a alpaca even though that's
basically the llama so in the US let's
say 1,000 people have llamas let's say
you know 2,500 people have porcupines
and let's say three thousand people have
alpacas Canada though they're not as
into all of these animals only 50 people
have llamas a thousand people have
porcupines and you know 600 people have
alpacas we're going to hit apply here
and we're going to have two charts get
made the US vs canada normally this is
the point where i get very angry because
why is the US pine bigger than the
canada pie well it's because overall
there are more people who own these
exotic animals in the u.s. than own
these exotic animals in Canada so
illustrator tries to do as a favor and
makes the Canadian pie smaller generally
what I have you do is you close this
window here you right-click you go to
type and then you change your position
it was it ratio and you change it to
even so there's going to be an even size
for every single one of your graphs but
luckily we can use this for our bubble
charts to automatically sighs all of our
bubbles because the number of people pet
owners in the USA is larger than the
number of pet owners in Canada and so
when if we go back through undo look at
our data again it's because these
numbers here are larger than these
numbers here that USA is bigger than
Canada so let's take advantage of that
let's get rid of all this and go into
Excel all right so now we're in Excel
and we have our data here we have our
city and we have our population and
we're just going to cut and paste that
into the data box here we're going to
hit apply
and hey look at that la San Diego San
Francisco Fresno Sacramento Eureka we
can't really read it but it's a small
price to pay so what has happened is
illustrator has taken all of these
population numbers and done all that
hard work for us of resizing each of
these circles based on the area that
they should be taking up so life is good
now all we need to do is maybe make this
text a little bit more readable so we
know which cities were working with move
the cities to the places they belong and
then resize them to be saying aye sir
sighs so the first thing we will do is
we're going to go grab our white
selection tool and we're going to select
all of the text so you can either click
and drag and grab all the text or you
can hold down alt and then click twice
and it will select all the text now
we're just going to make the font size a
little bit smaller so we can see which
cities were working with if we try to do
any of the stuff we're doing right now
with the selection tool the black arrow
the black pointer it'll just grab the
entire graph at the same time which will
not allow us to do much of anything so
white selection to a white selection to
a wide selection tool so now we're going
to move each of these cities to the
place that they belong we're going to
turn on our underlay map so we know
where all of these cities are first
we're going to take Los Angeles we're
going to move it down here we're going
to take San Diego we're going to move it
down there San Francisco oh look what's
happening so because this circle is kind
of small instead of grabbing the middle
of the circle what I ended up doing was
it just grabbing one edge of the circle
and then pulling that down so we're
going to undo that and for this one I'm
just going to try to grab in the black
area so they're moving a successful grab
in the black area again don't let any of
those anchors show up any of those white
boxes avoid them like the plague and
Sacramento is our last one nope
Eureka now if you try to grab Eureka it
you will always just get the edges so
what you can do is is if you select all
of it like that tah-dah in of Eureka so
I'll do it one more time if you have a
circle that's very small just click and
drag with the white selection tool and
now the whole thing will be selected and
even click and drag it all the way over
to where it belongs great look at these
wonderful wonderful cities alright so
now all we have to do is get rid of
these labels get rid of this legend and
resize these bubbles to be the size that
we want them to be but first a little
bit of housekeeping so we made a mistake
in that we put our graph inside of our
state layer so I have another layer
that's specifically for City bubbles
I'll actually get rid of it I'll create
a new one click down here create new
layer a double click I'm going to call
it City bubbles and then I'm going to
drag my graph into the city bubbles
layer we have to do this now because
once we make this stop being a graph
it's going to create all kinds of
circles of text and we won't have to we
don't have to deal with those so what
we're going to do is first we want to
delete all the things on the graph that
we don't like so we don't need all these
labels anymore going to delete the
labels we don't need this legend anymore
going to delete the legend oh look at
that saying we can't remove it because
it's still a graph so what we're going
to have to do is make this stop being a
graph so grab your black selection tool
click anything on here anything on the
magraph you go to object on group you
get a very scary warning the warning
will say if the graph is ungrouped you
won't be able to access its style its
data or change its graph designs and you
say I don't care so yes that sounds
wonderful to me and you can see that
inside of City bubbles you now have a
few different group
that contain all sorts of stuff so these
groups are actually going to cause us
trouble and a little bit but first let's
see why they're going to cause us
trouble because you might run into this
issue later so first we're going to take
the white selection tool and we're going
to delete this population bit up here
and now we're going to attempt to resize
all of these circles so because they're
in a group you can just click them with
the black selection tool you could also
use the white selection tool hold down
alt and then click one of them twice and
you'll get all of these selected
normally when we want to make things
bigger we use the scale tool if we use
the scale tool in this situation by
double clicking and saying uniform two
hundred percent we want them to be twice
as big unfortunately all of our bubbles
end up moving and the reason why they
end up moving is because the scale tool
operates as if you were pulling on one
of these edges here and so not only does
it make all of the bubbles bigger or
smaller it also pushes them farther
apart or closer together just like we
were resizing the entire image so that
is not what we want to have happened we
want each of these individually to get
bigger what you would normally do or
what we will end up doing is using
something called transform each so if
you go to transform transform each we
can change these numbers here and it
will transform each one of these circles
on its own but if we preview it it's
doing the same thing as scale and that's
because we need to ungroup more and more
and more so once you have all of these
selected go to object on group object
ungroup object ungroup keep on grouping
until there is no other ungroup option
there so now none of these bubbles are
connected to each other except for the
fact that we have all of them selected
so now we're going to go
transform transform each we're going to
click preview down here so we can see
what we're doing and then we're just
going to adjust these numbers until
there's something that we think is
reasonably good let me 320 looks pretty
good we want to make sure horizontal and
vertical are the same just so that these
keep staying as circles instead of
becoming ellipses so we're going to hit
okay we're going to have our nice
bubbles we can make them transparent we
could make if you click right here this
little circle over here on the right
hand side of city bubbles we can make
the opacity for every single one of them
all at the same time be forty percent by
selecting opacity up here or if we just
select each of them using this little
select tool over here we can change
their individual opacity to be forty
percent so that when there is a little
bit of overlap you can see oh you know
San Diego is moving into Los Angeles so
even though this tutorial took almost as
long as the other tutorial because of
the fact that all you need to do is cut
and paste your data into the pie graph
tool it is a far easier way to make your
bubble graphs good luck