Real-world mapping (NW Slovenia)

I'm preparing a map of fishing areas in the region for a brochure and it's currently a work in progress. I'm balancing several constraints; on the one hand the whole thing has to be legible, the roads have to be easily visible, but on the other hand the focus must be on the rivers themselves - which rules out using most regular road or regional maps, since they focus more on the towns. The only way to go seemed to be a "re-mapping" of the area.

For the region outlines, town, road and river placement and relief shading I used public domain maps as a guide ... followed by a lot of work with the pen tool in Illustrator.

Attachment 38730

I'm not yet satisfied with the fonts, but the main thing I'm going to have to work on next is:

a) making the rivers prettier, adding tapering starts to them, working on the river names

b) adding the actual fishing regions

c) prettying up the terrain a bit more ... not sure yet how I'll set about doing that. Probably going to use a photoshop layer, brushes and textures for that.

Now it's a pretty day and I'm off to cycle and snap some textures.

:!:

The roads, rivers and lettering are all super but I am not so sure about the shaded relief bit at this stage. What kind of PD maps did you take this info from. You can get 3D DEMs of terrain for the whole earth and get shaded relief out of them moderately easily. There's a few stages to go through but its all free apps to do it. My suggestions is to google for Wilbur and get some SRTM DEM data from Nasa. The best link I know is this one. I am not sure if Wilbur will read these directly, you may need QGIS which is also free. I use different tools but they are somewhat exotic so I cant advise the best path. Having a 3D map of your local area is a good bit of data to have at hand tho - esp if your in the Alpine region.

Edit - oh and post some mountain pics of Slovenia. I am curious and I looked at some on google images today. Very pretty. If you have some of glaciers and esp the snowline of mountains at the transition where the snow melts that would be generally useful to me and others who program terrain generators.

This looks really good, very professional.

I think the relief looks nice, and conveys a general feel for the terrain, but if you need more precision and detail (for example so people know what to expect on hiking trails) then you probably want to work on it more.

Redrobes, thanks for the suggestion. That sounds like a very good idea and it would be ideal, honestly. Wilbur and Nasa data ... let's see about putting that into action!

I'm afraid I can't help you too much with snowlines though. There's only a little tiny glacier here though, since the highest peak is about 2900 metres and the weather, at least in my area, is still quite influenced by the mediterranean (i.e. very warm), but fortunately also by the mountains (i.e. wet and thus green). For photos of mountains, this site, Zaplana, should be chock full of them. It's mostly hiking trails, but there's also a lot of photos. Admittedly the site is a bit old and I'm not certain how maintained it is ... but, well. Otherwise googling something on the topic of "slovenske gore" should give you a lot of photos as well.

So, I'm getting back to fooling around with this map ... spent a bunch of time this afternoon downloading data from NASA, finding out it was the wrong data, wondering what the heck I'm doing it for again, walking the dog, then coming back and just fooling around a bit, to see if I can make it look a bit more relevant with a bit of cheating ...

then I tossed the whole thing aside and did a little doodling as practice. I'm not even sure what this style should be called or what I should do with it ... whether I should finish it or not, etc., etc., but here it is:

Attachment 39628

It's basically part of the same region, but I played around and remodelled the landscape a bit, changed the borders at random, modified place names. Now to find out what in blazes this could be used for! :D