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Need some advice - not just Zann, but cartographers in general. I've placed capital cities and labeled them whether large or medium sized. I placed the few large (over 1.5 million) cities that aren't district capitals, and labeled them. Then I placed the medium cities. I figure that's enough labeled city data for the topo version of the map. Then for the political map I put names on all the medium cities - those in Zanannia anyway. I tried to deprecate the importance of the neighboring nation by not labeling the mediums. <shrug> - I could go either way on that, it's only four more names.
Here's the question - I was planning on placing the myriad small cities, and just not labeling them. After all, that's 60+ named places already - probably plenty at this scale. I figured adding dots for smaller places would let me show population distribution better. But I'm now thinking adding another 3x the existing cities will clutter things too much. Opinions? I put "about the right number" on the two southeastern districts as examples, on the second of these two versions. Smaller dots maybe? Skip the small ones altogether?
Here's how the topo looks with this many big and medium cities. I wouldn't put the small ones on this in any case.
Also, when I've speckled unlabeled small cities on a map before, sometimes I've implied that's all there are, by putting a lower bound on size in the legend. And sometimes I've left it open, with a caveat in the legend something like "only principal small cities shown". I know the whole Zanannian nation is invented, so whatever I say (or Zann says), goes, in general. Somehow the latter choice, explicitly saying "these are by no means all" just seems more realistic. For example most million-population cities will have a halo of smaller municipalities around them. In those cases folks speaking to someone from far away will say they're from, say, Dallas, TX, rather than Plano or Irving, which are decent-sized cities in their own right. Or maybe that's a poor example, since Texans are pretty proud of place :-). Okay, *I* (just 700 miles away) would describe a relative living there as being from Dallas rather than Plano, how about that?
Does one not even bother noting that the biggest cities shown are one flavor or another of "metropolitan area" without regard to city limits and how many incorporated municipalities there are?
Any commentary or criticism in general?
Zann, I used mostly Roman, Italian, French and Esperanto as bases for the city names. You'll see a few English bits too, and I guess Roman whatever-opolis really are Greek origin. Some have actual meanings (Sekurahaveno, Saltuscedro, Fajra-cieux), some are synthetic (put whatever meaning you wish on the repeated Sie/Sipa prefixes), and some are just glued-together pieces of real city names.
You'll notice (hopefully only if you stare) uneven spacing in the names... when using pixel fonts, one may be too tight & two too spread <shrug> ... I erred on the side of legibility.
