I'm preparing a map of fishing areas in the region for a brochure and it's currently a work in progress. I'm balancing several constraints; on the one hand the whole thing has to be legible, the roads have to be easily visible, but on the other hand the focus must be on the rivers themselves - which rules out using most regular road or regional maps, since they focus more on the towns. The only way to go seemed to be a "re-mapping" of the area.

For the region outlines, town, road and river placement and relief shading I used public domain maps as a guide ... followed by a lot of work with the pen tool in Illustrator.

Click image for larger version.  Name: WIP-KSP-version02.jpg  Views: 157  Size: 201.7 KB  ID: 38730

I'm not yet satisfied with the fonts, but the main thing I'm going to have to work on next is:

a) making the rivers prettier, adding tapering starts to them, working on the river names

b) adding the actual fishing regions

c) prettying up the terrain a bit more ... not sure yet how I'll set about doing that. Probably going to use a photoshop layer, brushes and textures for that.

Now it's a pretty day and I'm off to cycle and snap some textures.