How can I make a floorplan with this black and white style?

[alestaxtar]

Hello everyone, I was planning to make a floorplan of a castle. Looking in the internet, I found this page http://www.castles-of-britain.com/groundplans.htm, which has some floorplans of castles and keeps. I really like how they look, so I was wondering if there is a software I can use to make maps like these.

herstmonceuxgroundplan.gif

[Gamerprinter]

That looks vector to me, which would be Illustrator, Xara Designer, Corel, or Inkscape, though you could also use an image editor like Photoshop, GIMP, or Paintshop Pro, really any standard graphics application can make maps like that, depends on what you have and what you are comfortable using. A vector application would probably be faster at creating that style of map. I use Xara Designer Pro, a vector app to create photo-realistic maps, or to finish hand-drawn map compositions, but B/W vector shapes and drop shadows would be pretty easy to do in Xara, or other similar vector applications.

[JustinSlick]

A vector application would be a great fit, like Gamerprinter said.

I'll also suggest SketchUp as an alternative option because it is free, extremely easy to use, and lends itself very well to castle shapes. This doesn't match the style exactly but honestly only took me like ten minutes to cook up. And of course, you could spend more time making sure the palette, line weight, camera angle, and shadows are exactly how you want them.



One advantage is that with SketchUp you get the "3d-ness" and shadows (if you want them) automatically, but the drawing techniques are almost exactly the same as if you were using a 2D application.

One drawback is that the SketchUp 2D exporter does not handle anti-aliasing very well by default. But if you export at high resolution and then scale the image down for the web it ends up pretty clean (as above).

Anyway, good luck!

[alestaxtar]

Ok, SketchUp and Xara Designer, got it. I'll try both of them, thank you for answering guys!