Creating Custom Highway Symbols! + Road Map History

Take a moment and say, "What if I can create my own Interstate highway?". This can trigger through imagining your own highway system when creating your own road maps. Ask yourself the following questions (that goes for civil engineers and other people who build these highways, too):

If you answer "yes" to any of these questions, let me show you how!

First off, I want to say about my history of road maps.

The methods work out easily, plus they are pretty practical (or impractical if you are a child reading this). I drew roads since I was 3 years old; that's before I even spoke words! Though, the road was just a highway, having an intersection at the other end of the poster. As my drawing progresses, I soon get older and start to draw more like real road maps. I soon started to imagine "What if I made more space for road maps instead of scaling it down from Matchbox cars, and Micro Machines, and started making them look even more realistic?". I never though about it until I was in 8th grade, and I started my very first civilized road map system. The project was named "Knightville", because the city had medieval time with a whatchamacallit theme yadda-yadda-yadda.

Roads since I was four:

Roads since I was seven:

Roads since I was twelve (and present):

(These are just rough illustrations done in Chrome Canvas. I'm not very neat when drawing without a touchscreen.)

I'm trying to get the photos of my map. When they are here, they will be at the end of the blog entry.

Creating Signs

Best. Part. Ever!

You can create signs from many sources, such as the links below:

Google Maps

I want you to take this URL:

https://www.google.com/maps/vt/icon/name=assets/icons/road/edged_three_v2_apex-1-small.9.png,assets/icons/road/edged_three_v2_bar-1-small.9.png,assets/icons/road/edged_three_v2_bottom-1-small.9.png&highlight=da6161,ffffff,3878c7&color=ffffffff&psize=9&font_weight=bold?scale=1&text=35E

Take it and edit the URL with these parameters:

Here are some examples, to see what it's like:

Try it out and see what benefits you can have when it comes to making custom route. You can make it real, colorful, silly, or scary. Share your route sign online!

Project Knightville Road Map Pictures

Interstate 24 intersection on bottom-left, abandoned Walmart on the left, along with the airport. Newly build Walmart on top, with the old parking lot still there. Boxes with arrows are traffic lights.

Brown lines indicate rail. If they are parallel, it's all one track; plus, they're a tram system! 😃

Double right turn is shown on the bottom.

Includes a mini town on opposing sides of U.S. highway 29, shown going up and down, James Clemons Towne. Interstate 166 on top.

Dimensions: 59 pages long × 6 pages wide (58'1"×4'3") (16.4846 m×1.2954 m) using 8.5"×11" copy paper.

This is an extremely busy roundabout with traffic lights.

This is like Memorial Pkwy in Huntsville, AL, but this is somewhere else. Remember that these road maps are imaginary and MUTCD-related, not exactly from a place. I make this up.

A 6-lane reversible road, with 2 flowing traffic lanes on each side. It turns into a 3-lane reversible road when it undivides.

The circles are temporary. They are meant as placeholders for where I'm putting new business during the coronavirus pandemic. Cabella's is on the right.

About StickyChannel92

StickyChannel92 is a programmer in development. He is addicted to the stuff like this and lives out in Northern Alabama