I am also new!

[Gowienczyk]

Hello Mike, Nice political borders on your maps there

Welcome, im sure you will gets lots of good comments around here.

I think they are quite sloppy, personally! Haha.

Sounds like a plan.

[jfrazierjr]

Welcome to the Guild!

[Midgardsormr]

Welcome!

First thing: Take a look at Fogdown in the Cartographer's Choice board. Redstar created that map in Flash and then did a little bit of post-work in Photoshop. It's a superb example of what can be done with Flash.

Your maps are extremely low-contrast. I had to turn the contrast setting on my monitor down in order to see them at all (which is probably a good thing on my part, since I didn't realize it was up so high). It looks almost as though you've turned the opacity of the entire image down, graying it out.

Now, using a vector program like Flash gives you a big advantage in the ability to zoom in as much as you want, but I think you should choose the zoom-level you want the maps to be viewed in and design the icons and labels for that scale. As it stands, the mountains are tiny, and the labels and glyphs (very nice, by the way) are enormous. I zoomed in twice and found that level to be comfortable.

There's a huge amount of whitespace. I'd drop the titles at the top, since you've also got the continents labeled, and crop it in to leave no more than 30% of the vertical "page" as whitespace. 20% would be better.

Concerning the borders, I think the way they're drawn in is fine. You might vary the shade of each country slightly to make it more obvious what the lines represent. We're used to seeing those political maps where each country is a different color, so I think that would improve the sense that there are multiple nations on each continent.

Very nice work, and I'm looking forward to seeing what else you come up with! As you experiment, be sure to post some tips on using Flash for cartography--we don't see very many maps made with it.