Regional Map of the Republic of Renaliac

[Eld]

Hey folks!

After a pause of almost two years I found my way back to your great guild. Well, I've never been far away and the beautiful Cartographer's Choices kept inspiring me a lot. However, I had not enough time to work hard on my map and so there were only minor progresses to show.

Now I have a bit more time to work on the maps of my world Nerrac and some progress was achieved.
Later on I will update my almost dead WIP thread on my world map of Nerrac, but today I want to show you another piece.
It's a regional map focused on the Republic of Renaliac that I derived from the continental map, rescaled and overhauled. By doing this I tested some new methods for the style and was very pleased with the results so that I applied those methods on the continental map also.

So here's the map with the political situation of 3167 n.N. and the geographic labelling as far as finished.

As you can see the labelling of places and rivers and such is not finished yet as I have to come up with the names first which is a rather slow process.
The white lines within Renaliac resemble the borders of the four provinces of the Republic. The capital Renaliac does not belong to any province and is therefor encircled in white.

I'd be very happy to get some feedback.
I'm especially interested in your opinions on the style, colors etc. I'm thinking about the border color of the states at the edges of the map. There the color runs along the borders of the map. Is this ok or does it look strange?
Another issue is the font for the mountain label. I found it hard to choose something fitting. This one is called Palatino Linotype, in bold and italic.

So feel free to comment as you like and thanks for any feedback!

[Meriba]

Thanks for sharing your work. I'm not an expert and this is not my mother language, but I could try to explain my point of view.

Map
Mountains are shadowed and hills not. It looks strange, like not finished.
If you simplify the terrain (mountains, hills, etc), maybe you should simplify the rivers too. (Too wavy?)
The color of the rivers is very strong over the smooth terrain.
The resolution of the whole map is a little bit low (pixelated)
I think that the red border line between countries doesn't work. Maybe if you use only the colored borders (without the main red line) it would works better.
I like the black and white border, but if you want to use it, it's not necessary the scale, because in most maps it's is used for that.
The white line for provinces looks a bit odd. You could try a more subtle dotted line (less oppacity).
The colored border before the edge of the map looks like the countries finish there and I don't think so.

Labels
A label can't cover a map element. Well, this sounds a little bit too radical... I would say that is preferred not to.
The black countries labels can be integrated in the background, as an option, or introduce a border to highlight them (I prefer a more subtle option -bevel and transparent in this case).
The cities/castles icons looks like stickers, in some cases flying over the mountains.

I specially like the background texture, the black and white border and the font type used.
Nice work!

[Pixie]

I like this map very much. It is well composed and visually atractive, specially at thumbnail. However, seen up close, it is low on resolution. I agree that it is a bit too pixelated.

There is one other issue I can't help noticing - the busy mess that is the mountain range of Nabraxam. You don't need to have the label on top of the border. Try side by side instead. Also, the word Azandor can be way more bent and pushed a little bit down, so it doesn't cross so many elements. Lastly, did you try a version with black rivers (or dark, but not black)? I feel it would give it a more authentic feel.

Did I mention I like the setting? The con names are very nice!

[Eld]

Thanks very much for your feedback and the observations.
You helped me to improve my map very much!


Most of your points were very helpful for me and I worked them off. However, there are two things I can't get solved.
First the pixelation both of you mentioned. The map has a size of 2420x1520 pixels and a resolution of 300 ppi which in my opinion should suffice for a map. Maybe you have some advice for me how to fix the problem without redoing the whole map?
To soften the pixelated appearance a bit I redid some of the minor rivers where the effect was worst.
Second the sticky castles flying on mountain tops. Indeed the castle symbols are just put in on the coordinates where the castles are supposed to be. This of course runs into conflict with the perspective view of the mountains. As long as I can't come along with a proper solution I'll just leave out the castle symbols.

Some other things have changed as proposed and you can see the current version of the map here:

I decided to stay with blue rivers as I had black ones before and was not very happy with it. To have blue rivers feels like a big progress to me. However, I decided to lower the opacity of the river layer so they will fit in better.

The next step will be to make up names for the yet unnamed cities and rivers and hills and such. After that I will try to make a nice map legend outside the black-white-border line of the map. Are there any tutorials here in the guild on that topic which you could recommend?

As a little info or bonus you can here see the sector of my continental map which was the start for the map.


As always I am thankful for feedback.

[Pixie]

The problem with the pixelation (mainly in the rivers) is that you are using a very hard brush (pen/pencil?). If you want, try retracing them with a brush that has some blur.

[Eld]

That's the current state of the map. I added a lot of names and cities, changed some of the existing ones, repositioned a few, desaturated the blue of the rivers and some minor changes.
Are the river still to pixelated? I tried it with a smooth blur, but didn't want to overdo it.



Next step will be to name the missing cities, mountains and such.
After that I will add a legend on the right and make some topic-maps as historical views and such.

@Meriba: "(I prefer a more subtle option -bevel and transparent in this case)" that sounds interesting, though I don't know how to do that.

[Gidde]

i think the rivers look ok now as far as the pixelation goes, but the color still doesn't fit with the map style. are they on a separate layer? if so, try switching that layer to multiply mode and lessen the opacity of the layer a bit and see what you think. that will make the background affect the color a bit and it could match better. I love the look of the rest of the map, if you could get the rivers into the same style it would look great

[Eld]

So, here's an update. I did hardly anything else but naming things and replacing labels the last two days. I had to come up with the names mostly from scratch, using my conlang, modern Nazcenish, or te Gibai Nazcenil megil as it would call itself. You'll recognise many naming elements ocurring in various city names. Principally the cities have old names or were named after one or another of the many Nazcenorian kings, for instance Sarasedad which was founded during the rule of one of the six kings named Saraséd. Also some cities have color-names as in the Nazcenian religion each of the nine deities has its own color as well as mankind has its own, e.g. Alvaliac is the White City, Renaliac, the Capital is the Red City and so on. Eventually I managed to name everything on the map. It was really hard to get all those city names on the map with a maximum of readability. Maybe there's still place for improvement. I also tried your suggestion, Gidde, and am very pleased by the look of the rivers now.



Next step will be the legend and framework. If you know good tutorials for that sort of work, I'd be very interested.

[Gidde]

Yeah, it's tough to get all the labels on there and have everything still look nice *and* be readable. Nice job

[Eld]

So, another semester later I finally found some time and did the last steps on the map. In the end I came up with two versions as I'm not sure which one is better.

Version 1:


Version 2:


What do you think is the prettier one?

Have you any further suggestions or comments?