Reply With QuoteI think that the earlier mountains look better too... but I always prefer hand drawn styles.
I am of the opposite oppinion, i think the mountains of the first iteration looked a lot better...the style matched better with the rest of the map.
Very interesting continent shape you have there.
I'd like to know more about the story you are writing and about the world and its cultures.
I'm trapped in Darkness,
Still I reach out for the Stars
I think that the earlier mountains look better too... but I always prefer hand drawn styles.
This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
thats a lovely map. i like the use of red for the first letter of the nations (im guesing), though i do prefer the first version of the mountains - they have a more realistic hand-drawn feel to them, though either way, great job
Thanks for all the feedback!
I think I'll try redoing the hand drawn mountains here over the next few days. I've started working on some cities and close ups of the regions (not necessarily nations vorro, not yet at least). Give me a few and I'll post an update and see what you all think! Thanks again!
JB
Hello, alter ego - welcome to the Guild :-).
I'm with some of the others - the original hand-drawn type of mountain symbology seems to work better with the rest of the map. THe new *layout* is an improvement. If the original ones seem too "cut-and-pasted", like they're not part of the terrain, it could be because many have a flat (or abruptly cut-off) bottom edge. Somebody posted about a cure for that in the last few months - something about running some ridges *toward* the viewer, which stick out "below the triangle" of individual peak symbols. The examples were startling, how instantly they seemed to take root and become apart of the overall terrain.
AS for some of the iffy rivers needing to stay like they are - do you mean your story calls for river transport between A and B and C, hence a river has to run thataway? Problem is, even then unrealistic rivers could mess with your storytelling later. Take for example somebody rowing inland from a port city - they're having to row *upstream*. If they row, and row, and eventually come to another coast, without changing rivers, how will they approach the other river mouth 'properly' rowing downstream? A single river can't flow both ways, and oceans connected to other oceans are going to be at the same level. As a corrolary to the "water flows downhill" principle ( I assume you're not going to mess with such basics?) , if water reaches a 'decision point' where one might think it would split, virtually always it will 'choose' the even slightly lower course, and you wind up with no split. Minor midstream islands notwithstanding, that holds true very very widely. And that holds for lakes as well - there just *can't* be more than one outlet; not for very long. One will be ever so slightly lower and 'capture' all the flow, or else if a pair of outlets are briefly the same, flow will cut one a *little* deeper and again that will capture the whole of the outflow.
Now, if you *have* to have that "river traffic" on some of those routes, how about if you make some of the connectors canals instead? Man-made (god-made, whatever) with some kind of locks to do a bit of flow control, and you could get continual boat-borne traffic all *over* the place. I'm not rewriting your setting, just sayin' the less you have to 'explain away' to a reader, the more he'll believe what's going on.
I'm pretty much not buyin' the peninsula-long river in Yarad. While technically possible, there are so many places where it gets close to the sea, one would expect it to 'fall off' to one side and terminate. Picture the required topography - you need the whole peninsula to be a bit trough-shaped, with the upper end of the river (near Auda?) being way higher altitude than the mouth down by Arlo - and downhill all the way southward. Yet your symbology shows the land near the Auda Sea to be flattish - at least not as high as you'd expect the foothills by Nal to be. And it looks like the general slope from the eastern rim of high mountains down to the sea on the Terminae side.
The palette is indeed nice. I'd warn you that the nice (I agree) initial red letters are close to being red-on-green, and a noticeable part of the population isn't going to be able to see the red letter at all ! Too, the contrast is lower for red-on terrain as for black-on-terrain - would it be worth it to outline the initial letters with a bit of a black rim?
Still, it does LOOK very nice - you have something good going here!
I think the hand drawn mountains were more suited to the style of the rest of the map. But I like the new arrangement better. More natural. Less "Mordor." There's nothing wrong with Mordor, but only Mordor gets to be Mordor.
This is beautiful, and I also love the color palette (but I feel a little silly echoing everyone else).
For critiques, I would suggest adjusting the kerning (spacing between the letters) on the large font that you've got red and black. If you're going to go with this resolution for the final map, some of your intended audience may have trouble reading the two smaller fonts. It looks like you've got four separate fonts. The general rule may very be different for maps, but for most graphic design projects it is rarely recommended to go over four fonts.
I really look forward to how you evolve your mountains! I'm tackling a similar problem myself.
Hey everyone, thanks for the critiques and everything! I've been really busy as I'm going through a job change and an impending move. I will take all of the critiques into consideration, especially the resolution, which I'm not too overly happy with myself. I hope to get a new version up within the coming weeks! Thanks a million!
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