Reply With QuoteSeeing as how I'm brand new here, I don't have any feedback or suggestions, but simply a WOW! That looks awesome!
Wow, this is really coming together beautifully. Love the story behind it as well. On a completely unrelated note, I just realized that you live in my neck of the woods. My wife and I are live on the North Shore. Nice to meet someone here who lives nearby. Anyway, looking forward to watching this continue to unfold.
Cheers,
-Arsheesh
Seeing as how I'm brand new here, I don't have any feedback or suggestions, but simply a WOW! That looks awesome!
Wow… The dedication you are putting into this is inspirational and the results are fantastic. The only things I'm not so fond of is the river labels, which are kinda hard to read, and the brightness of the city icons, which looks somewhat artificial. Other than that, I love everything about the map!
Hi Lingon, thanks for the encouragement and feedback. Do you think it's the font I've chosen for the rivers that's the issue, or more an issue of size/colour? I agree they're really hard to read, I'm thinking it might be the light blue text with the white glow... perhaps I need to think about a much darker blue for the water feature labels. Hopefully I can keep the same font, as I'm using the same one for everything thus far.Originally Posted by Lingon
The cities are just placeholders at the moment; the markings are the actual to scale size and layout of the cities so I wanted to draw them in with something that would stick out from the map. I may only keep the "to scale" markings for my own reference and try think up a "display" icon for them, or otherwise tone the cities back so they blend in a little better, perhaps a darker more burgundy red.
I have to agree with the others...this is developing quite nicely. Looking forward to the rest of this world. And i hope you'll keep on sharing the backstory as well. It fills the map with more flavour, so to speak.
Have some Rep.!
I'm trapped in Darkness,
Still I reach out for the Stars
Hi gumboot, really impressive work. It' s good to read that there are always coming new stories in mind, while working. It' s the same with me. Im always focussing on a region while working an the further and deeper i go the clearer gets the story. And this is influencing the work itself. Funny thing. Maybe we could realize a city-partnership between our worlds :-)
So I have a few little technical setbacks that I'm trying to overcome at the moment. One is that I realised I completely fouled up my city scale so they're all way, way too big. When correctly scaled, they're too small to really work on the map so I'll have to come up with a city marker instead, but I am stumped as to what I should do, and if I'm going to have a city marker I think I'll need to come up with a marker for towns and fortresses as well. So a bit of thinking to do there.
I do, however, really like having the actual layout of the cities displayed, particularly as this map is primarily a reference tool for myself, so the more information the better. I am currently experimenting with the possibility of adding small inserts along the border depicting each of the cities in more detail.
I also had a bit of a demographics scare. I have always been a little skeptical of the population size of my cities, as produced by the demographics spreadsheet. For some reason I had in mind that the kingdom was about the size of France, and while looking at the historic population of Paris I saw that it was significantly larger than the largest city in this kingdom. However I belatedly realised that actually my kingdom is less than half the size of France, much closer to the size of Great Britain. And that my largest cities are in keeping with the historical size of London.
Having said that, I do feel that as a very fertile, rich, and continental country, perhaps some of the cities need to be beefed up in size a little, but this would completely disrupt my demographics. Aye me.
Also,
Arsheesh:
Thanks for the hello, it is indeed good to run into a fellow Kiwi. I live out West Auckland.
Lingon:
I experimented with a darker text for the river labels and it seems to have improved things a little. Let me know what you think when I put my next update it.
Sounds good, will do
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with for the city icons (and I like the idea of inserts in the border)!
Although this is intended as a reference for myself, I am still decidedly jealous of everyone's amazingly beautiful "display" maps here, so thought I'd have a play with some of the more "presentation" related features of my map. These sections below display a mock up of a city detail insert, and my first attempt at a combined compass rose and scale.
The city insert was a very quick mockup, and as you can see I can afford to make the city itself much larger in the frame, but I am wondering if the size is so small, it's not worth putting in. I can make them larger, of course, but with 20 cities to depict (I've relegated one city to town status!), this size shown allows ten down each side. If I make the mini maps larger I will have to think more carefully about how to arrange them.
The compass rose combines two visual elements:
The underlying image is the religious symbol of the Espallian Church, my world's equivalent of the Catholic Church. The silver "Ring of ALL" (often depicted aflame) represents the totality of the Espalli god Un ("All"), in contrast with the faceted old state religion of the Terran Republic, which was represented by a black-and-white eight-pointed star called an Ainemastrae (the points representing the four ethereal and corporeal elements and the black-and-white rays representing the duality of good and evil in all things). The symbol over the Ring of ALL is a stylised Ainemastrae used as a sort of "logo" for my writing project.
Interesting rose. Personally I don't really like the metallic look, it rarely blends well with any map, but if you like it it's all good. The design itself I find pretty cool though.
The city insert looks good, it gives a clearer view of the city layout without being so overpowering on the map, compared to the previous red cities. I think it might look better if sized up, but it's hard to say for sure with only that one; maybe it would become too much city when all twenty are there.
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