Fantastic!!
Fantastic!!
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
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Great, now I have map envy! Great job Rob!
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Indeed.Originally Posted by arsheesh
I think the best thing about this map is the sheer amount of detail and text you crammed in, and yet it's still completely neat and legible. Kudos!!
Ha, and here's me thinking that I'm actually holding back on adding detail. I guess I'm addicted to detail.
That's actually one of the goals of this project, is to try not to add so much. I got bogged down with Sorol because every map required hundreds of new names, and it was exhausting after a while. So I wanted this world to be 1) smaller (success! The total land area is quite a bit less than on Sorol) and 2) less detailed (jury's still out I guess!).
New question: Should I retain this map style for other maps in the series, or should I come up with variations depending on the character of the region being mapped? I think I'd like to retain certain elements of the style but alter others... although I'm not sure if it would be worth the trouble.
I, myself, would try to make the maps look like they had different authors so if you're doing one kingdom then alter the style slightly for another kingdom. Fonts and colors (or lack of colors) are the easiest way to alter things but also line weight, hatching or cross-hatching or shading, style and detail of the inset images, etc. You probably have this figured out but if not I just gave ya some ideas
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
I guess it all depends on what the client wants, what the reasons are for the variations and whether the variations would take too much time.
The map is beautiful, btw.
Well the client is me, so I guess it depends on what I want.
I'm thinking that I'll retain the style of everything except the title text, which I'll vary from map to map. For example, the steampunk title style I used here would not be appropriate at all on the map of the Sabo Jungles, so I'll need to come up with a Darkest Africa-style title for that map. I like the other elements too much to use them on just one map, however.
This is really, really excellent. The names are just perfectly Britoid, and the style feels authentish. What did you use for the paper texture, I can see "postmark" there.Bodoni and Didot are excellent stereotypically 19th century fonts, and yes, Winkel isn't exactly the most 19th century of world map projections (but I myself used it for MINE anyway. Winkel II and Winkel triple are from the late 1910s/1920s so it's not that far-fetched
)
Hmmm, I went to steampunkwallpapers.com (or something like that) to find a good background image, and screened it way back in photoshop, and added a second paper texture that I found thru google image search. There's a watermark? Where is it, I need to know so I can brush it out.
You know, I used to think that typography wonks who said that you can't use, say, 20th century fonts for 18th or 19th century texts were full of it. But really, using a Winkel on this obviously Victorian map is just ... wrong! I don't think it's a matter of invention date -- Winkel is the projection used in my National Geographic wall map, and my desk atlas, and seems irretrievably linked to "modern" maps. I know I suggested Mollweide in my earlier message, and it's from the early 19th century, but it's the map of mid-20th century atlases (I see a particular map of the tectonic plates whenever I think of the Mollweide projection) and wouldn't be any more appropriate than Winkel. The 19th century is Mercator, the British Empire coloured pink; or maybe something a little more modest, an equirectangular perhaps. The 18th century is a pair of globulars or Lamberts, one for each of Old and New Worlds.Bodoni and Didot are excellent stereotypically 19th century fonts, and yes, Winkel isn't exactly the most 19th century of world map projections (but I myself used it for MINE anyway. Winkel II and Winkel triple are from the late 1910s/1920s so it's not that far-fetched
Yeah, this is all subjective, I know, but I think it's an important part of the cohesiveness of a map -- maybe not as important as, say, fonts (sigh), but important nonetheless.
(As to your own maps: the style of your Ysi map is alien enough that it doesn't bear many projection expectations (besides maybe "pre-modern"), so a pair of Lamberts works fine. Your Steamopera world map isn't as highly polished, and I think it has balance issues, so the choice of projection isn't the most obvious problem. I suspect, though, that if you polished the map and made it more aggressively Victorian, the projection would be jarring.)
(And on topic -- HandsomeRob, the map is fantastic! It has now replaced your own modern style as my favourite map from this site. Awesome!)
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