Maps are fun. Maps are hard. Maps can be beautiful and are generally incredibly useful.

The Donkey Sanctuary of Canada (DSC) welcomes hundreds of visitors every year to their special little corner of the Puslinch countryside. And yet—they did not have a visitor map for their 200 acre property.

The DSC also have several kilometres of walking/hiking/running trails on their property, also unmapped (at least, not “officially”).

I was thrilled when the DSC got in touch with me to ask me if I could create these two maps for them.

Google Maps helped to get me started (thank you, satellite view), and I used a screenshot of the property as a foundation for what was where at the sanctuary. I’ve been to the DSC several times, but even so, many of the structures on the property were unknown to me as behind-the-scenes buildings. The founder and two of their terrifically dedicated board members provided much-needed guidance to name and orient those structures, thank goodness. And, one of those same board members walked all of the trails and then superimposed his GPS map onto a Google Earth view of the DSC—and then shared this marvelously helpful map along to me (thanks Doug, I couldn’t have created the trails map without you!).

I created the maps using Adobe Illustrator over the course of about a couple of weeks. We went back and forth on the placement of some pieces of the map puzzles before the project was complete…and then off they went to the sign printer. Whoosh.

A terrific project as always with the DSC. Have I ever mentioned how much I love working on Donkey Sanctuary projects?

Here are the maps on the website on the sanctuary’s Visit Us page (website also designed by Sprout!) in case you have a minute to contemplate a visit to the Donkey Sanctuary. You can see the visitor map above, and below is the trails map: