Quote Originally Posted by Ascension View Post
Next, deserts form (here on earth) at the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. So if you have deserts all over your continent might be rather small or you need to adjust where the deserts are. If you only have one desert then you can either place the continent above or below the equator. So what I would do is draw each continent on its own sheet of paper - keeping the alignment bias in mind. Draw a big continent, a small one, and some medium ones. Don't draw in climates just yet just the landmasses. Then stick them all together in a way that pleases you without clumping them together. Then do the climates. If you really want to be obsessive then you can spend a long time researching and plotting the tectonics but it's really not worth it in my opinion...so long as you don't have a bunch of mountains going this way and that all over the place - just keep one or two main mountains chains on each continent. Getting a natural-looking world can be difficult at first but you have the basics down; just need some refining and schooling...and that's what we're here for

Overall, I'd take the last map and spread things out a lot more and take out one continent and put the detailed one in its place. But, then, I do everything by gut feeling and not by science...I know the science I'm just not fanatic about it.
Well....I hate to argue here, but that really depends on what you are calling a desert. There is the Gobi Desert in China, quite a distance north of the Tropic of Cancer. Then of course there is the Mojave/Nevada desert of North America. These are Desert, but not like the Sahara Desert, which is quite barren and devoid of Life. Then in British Columbia (where I live), there is the Okanagan Valley, which is often classified as being a desert.

An interesting website, is the following:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/deserts/what/

And gives an interesting fact: "Approximately one-third of the Earth's land surface is desert, arid land with meager rainfall that supports only sparse vegetation and a limited population of people and animals"