Looks nice, man.
So I'm writing a longtime alternate history that focuses on an alternate Spain and as part of that I ended up doing a population map for around the year 1150. The map was made with a relief map I found at Data-Spain and then a lot of different layers and layer styles with a pattern of "old paper" as the base. The cities were a simply multi pointed star and a box and I just added a bevel and drop shadow. City text was made with a simple outerglow of black at normal with some adjusted settings. The key is pretty simple: from lowest to highest population colors are:
Red
Orange
Green/Yellow
Dark Green
Light Blue
PopulationMapAltSpain.jpg
Looks nice, man.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Cool. Not knowing nearly as much about 12th-century Spain as I ought, can you tell us what's alternate about it?
I love the colours. I'm not sure, but I think the usual convention is for warm saturated colours (like red) to represent densely populated areas and cool light colours (like light blue) to represent less populated areas, but of course that's entirely up to you!
Thank you Ascension.
Mostly I posted it here to get the opinion of how the colors and such looked. My base map was obtained at Data-Spain, specifically this is the base map: http://www.maps.data-spain.com/shop/pic.php?id=3115 . Population changes are that the peninsula has about 4 million more people at the time and that they are more evenly distributed throughout instead of clustering along the coastal areas and rivers as Spain and Portugal are even today thanks to a lot more irrigation and a lot less war.
The point of divergence from our timeline is actually way back in 750. Instead of unifying Islamic Spain under Umayyad rule, Abd ar-Rahman fled to Asturias, converted to Christianity, became king and unified Spain and Morocco under a Christian regime that is far more open to Arab advancements. Let's see, fun changes: The Irish are colonizing the new world, feudalism never emerged, the Buddhists became violent militants and are conquering China, the Russians are Catholic, and there was a joint Christian-Muslim invasion of the Holy Land against proto-atheists.
Hmm, the thought process is that I associate red with dry/barren/hot or rather, places that are less hospitable to live and green as lush and growing, so perfect for populations.
Last edited by SSJPabs; 02-10-2011 at 03:12 AM.
I just typed population density into google images and had a look at the colour schemes that came up there, but you method has a logic too!