June 2010 Entry: Wheel of Time - from Falme to Fal Dara

[Immolate]

Trying some different fonts, switched the wood cut pattern to offshore (everybody's doing it), some further resizing of labels and gave a .5 gaussian blur to the mountains. I'm glad I still have a month to finish this thing because it might take that long just to get some mountains I can live with.

I went with Aridhol because Mordeth told me that he'd feed me to the machin shin if I used that "fancy pants new-fangeled so-called 'Shadar Logoth'". I don't mess with Mordeth any more after that one time.

So anyway, not a lot of progress but some needed reflection and correction.

### Latest WIP ###

[Gidde]

I'm still loving it overall, but the woodcut in the rivers is striking me as strange.

[tilt]

yes, I was just thinking the same as Gidde, or almost - I feel the woodcut in the rivers gets to "pressed" and think they would work better without that. And I hope you soon decide on the mountains cause I wanna see the rest - and I like the ones you have

[RobA]

Most maps with woodcut don't usually keep the rivers horizontal. They make rivers by repeatedly insetting strokes so the lines all seem to run parallel to the river shores.

-Rob A>

[Immolate]

I didn't have a lot of time tonight so I made changes in an attempt to make the map "right" before proceeding. I attempted to tone down the fonts while trying to preserve the balance between style and readability. I removed the woodcut from the rivers as suggested by several of you. The town and river fonts were replaced.

### Latest WIP ###

[tilt]

looks way better - however I do feel the stroke of the rivers could be slightly thinner (or lighter)? But looks good, looks like a place for a story... perhaps a good dozen books

[Gidde]

Looking good, Imm!

[Immolate]

One of the good things about starting early is that you're not forced to stick with something that isn't working for you. In this case, it wasn't so much that it wasn't working for me, but I felt an urge to go another direction after taking a few days off to deal with other things. There is a bit of color on the map now, and much of what was there before has changed a bit. The fonts are generally the same, although some changes in placement and presentation have been made. I have chosen a river font that I think I can live with.

I added political boundaries, both with lines and colors. One thing that Jordan did a lot with his original map is showed political boundaries just to one side of a river. While this happens now and then, it is rare. When a river exists between two places, it almost always becomes the boundary itself. One of the reason for this is that it's the path of least resistance. The other reason is that using a river as a boundary negates 99% of the arguments between nations about where the boundary actually is. Where Jordan's boundaries were very close to the river, I adopted the river as the boundary. It is quite possible that I erred here and there in my assumptions.

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[Steel General]

Although the other version was quite good, I prefer this style.

[tilt]

I'm with Steel General on this - don't really love the wood cut style - this is much more to my taste
And concidering how hard it is to hold on ones right to land on the other side of a river - I'm guessing its Jordan who actually erred here and there - no matter how many books on war and bla bla military bla... *lol*