Great map, but I do kind of agree with the others about the font. It is a cool looking font, but it is difficult to read in some places. The borders are also a little difficult, but not too bad.
Things I like...
- The whole map in general - nice work
- The style of the border
Things I don't care for to much...
- The font - very difficult to read
- The color of the border - for me it's to close to the mountain color.
Keep up the good work and looking forward to seeing more from you.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Great map, but I do kind of agree with the others about the font. It is a cool looking font, but it is difficult to read in some places. The borders are also a little difficult, but not too bad.
Saint Andrew's Queen is a really cool font, I use it myself whenever I can. But what I do is to put a faux bold style on it to thicken it up just a tad. You can find the faux bold on the Character window (also has faux italic, underline, all caps, small caps, strike-through, etc.).
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
As I stated before I think the map is gorgeous. I don't care too much for the labeling though... the font doesn't fit somehow. It might be because it's really thin, but still... not my favorite.
Check out my City Designer 3 tutorials. See my fantasy (city) maps in this thread.
Gandwarf has fallen into shadow...
I'm aware that the borders can be a bit tricky to see at times, I'll see what I can do about them. And I'll play around a bit with the colour of the map border as well to make it more distinct from the mountains.
I am in fact having second thoughts about the font, it can be difficult to read at times. The font coupled with the names (all names are Old English) makes for a very European feel. I'm thinking of making a world inspired by East Asia and I'm not really sure which font to use.
I've been quite busy this weekend but I'll post an update when I've worked out some of the problems with this version.
When I get stuck for which font to use, I start browsing through my collection (i have way too many) or page through dafont.com - just come up with a 3 or 4 word description for the feel you want, and jot down the names as you see ones that perk your interest. then go through and start comparing those side by side if you can. I use Amp Font Viewer to load them as temporary fonts, then place them all one after the other in the file i'm working on in photoshop) until I narrow it down to one or two, and if I still can't decide, i flip a coin
Plus that way you can test out the layer effects as you go - sometimes they don't look quite as neat as you thought they would once you start bevelling or outlining, too.
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
This is just a test with an other font, what's written will be changed later.
The brushwork in the background says the same thing but in japanese.
Does a font like this work?
Last edited by Andartar; 09-13-2009 at 02:10 PM. Reason: Typo
In the shot you have there it does work, for sure. that's a nice font in my opinion. But what happens with the smaller sizes, if you're using that for labelling cities and towns? My concern is that it would get lost in the map details (blend into forest, mountain, or other terrain)
My finished maps
"...sometimes the most efficient way to make something look drawn by hand is to simply draw it by hand..."
I think it works out fine even in smaller sizes, I've thinkened it up a bit and added an outer glow to make it stand out more against the background. And it does give the map a different feel than the previous font.
This is why critique is so important, thank you all very much!
I really like that brush work; I've been thinking of doing the same thing in Elvish on the Middle Earth map I'm working on. Thanks for posting it, now that I see it I'm sure that's what I want to do!
I like this font much better, it's very striking.