Geomapix Newsletter is Out - Success Story - Renewal of Mapping Program for Newfoundland & Labrador Tourism Department

This time last year we sat down 

with Target Marketing from St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador (NFLD), to look at improving the way that maps are created and updated for the tourism industry. Their client, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation, has been struggling with managing their map information that is being distributed around the world through their promotional material. NFLD tourism market has reached a billion dollars in revenues and having current and relevant information is important for enticing potential tourists to visit the beautiful vistas, festivals, and great people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The current large provincial road map, in use since the 90’s, was very difficult to update and problems arose when trying to derive new map products for their tourist promotions. The original product was designed in CorelDraw and the new design and production needed to be created in Adobe illustrator. A big issue, and where we came into the fold, was the original GIS data that the map was created from was lost in transition. So what we had was map data displayed in an irrelevant graphic software package that cannot be updated because there is no referencing GIS system and new data.

Yvonne Fowler of Target said to us

“Tourism and other associated departments have been trying for 5 years to build a mapping system where we are able to provide map updates or integrate new map data to our Adobe art designers so they can make custom products for tourism and other promotions”.

Originally born on “The Rock”, as many mainlanders have dubbed it, it was very important that I solve this problem and have something that not only functions well but can be used in the future as an online mapping resource that has the potential to change the way staff can manage location information and distribution to potential tourists.

So with some clearly defined goals we set out and created a GIS system that was improved from the original map data, had the ability to quickly add new map data, and could export any variation of maps out as Adobe Illustrator files so that the design staff could build graphics rich tourism related promotions for the NFLD billion dollar tourism market.

In March, prints rolled off the press with the new production of the Newfoundland and Labrador Road Map.

Check out some of the maps at our blogspot;

http://geomapixgateway.blogspot.ca/2013/04/newfoundland-labrador-project-maps.html