Nimia

[jbwncster]

any basic tutorials on how to do this?

[Zampinator]

WOW, nice map

[Protopop]

any basic tutorials on how to do this?

yes, here's the basics from earlier in the thread - If you have any specific questions let me know here, but really its just grabbing your imagination and tools and experimenting I think.

The outline is created in Illustrator. Here i crated the coastlines, the country borders, and figured out the names of each place. Working with vectors here is nice because i can zoom in and out easily.

I gathered high resolution satellite images and used photoshop's "content aware fill" to remove any lines or abberations in the textures.

I used Bitmap2Material to create seamless high resolution textures for the different landscapes. You can also use the seamless texture filter in GIMP

I brought the illustartor outline into photoshop and used it as a mask for the textures, and brought the textures together in photoshop. I usually use Fireworks, but it was just crashing. Photoshop seemed to handle the multilayered 8192x8192 file better.

All the text is added outside the map in html. To create the actual panning and zooming map I used this incredible open source map javascript library called Leaflet http://leaflet.cloudmade.com/