Quote Originally Posted by vorropohaiah View Post
not quite sure i understood you. in your example you mentioned Stolas - was that a good example or a bad one?
Well it's an example of the "issue"(as I see it), but it's not the best example(or in this case the one that looks the worst). It just so happens that that area of the map is clearly labeled ans thus easy to find the exact "location". Since i was on a tablet, I could not take a screenshot and point out the bits I think make it look bad.

You spent what I assume was many hours to create these great mountain symbols and then drop political boundaries on top of them which takes away from the final product. Since this is a representational map as opposed to a topographical or atlas style map where such boundaries might need to be precisely drawn, I would just favor a more lax approach to the boundaries since I believe it would make the map look better.

MapBordersOverlapMountains.jpg

Another example that looks really bad with this approach in my opinion and probably the one I think looks worst overall is the long mountain chain South and SouthWest of Miharast. Don't get me wrong, I am not against general grunge(ie, the map got stained or dirtied in the past), the paper folding, or other destruction of the map contents that interfere with the mountain symbols since that's a consequence of age of the map(in "character" so to speak), it's just the political borders overlapping the mountains which bug me. I would prefer to see either the mountains laid down and then the borders drawn around them or drop the borders and then place the mountains around them. Of course, knowing how long it takes to create such a map, I know the latter is likely not a viable solution and even the former may take too much time to "redo".