Geidor

[altasilvapuer]

Looks good. I really don't think they're that obtrusive - especially not the roads/seaways (if anything, those might be a little too unobtrusive moreso, as occassionally they are hard to make out). As for the cities themselves, they're clear but not overbearing, I think.

My only comments/suggestions are:

1.) With the antiqued wood looking cartouche... maybe you want to go with a more antiqued or thematically similar looking symbol for the cities or vice-versa.

2.) What do the different colors of city mean? You might want to have something about that in a key/legend.

For the roads, etc, I have to wonder if part of the problem is in the down-sampling process I undergo to upload. I actually resize the original as a PSD, and then save as JPG. It only occurred to me last night after I'd saved everything that I had a number of layer styles dependent on that full resolution that were incorrectly downsampling. As a result, I think I'm going to try down-sampling a flattened jpg before my next upload, and see if it improves.

I was actually also feeling something somewhat similar to what you mentioned about the cartouche, though in reverse. This world originally was (and still mostly is) conceived as a scifi world. The cartouche was just something fun thrown on one day when I thought I'd be printing it that day. I'd still like to go back to that, and I think the city and roads were at least a half-concious attempt to do so. I still haven't decided what I'm doing with the cartouche, though. Any ideas?

As for the city colours, I completely forgot to mention them when I uploaded. I'm still indecisive as to whether there will be a key explaining them or not, but basically the breakdown is this:

By colour:
The brownish-orange pips represent cities and other civilian areas.
The blue-grey pips represent military bases and installations and such.
The reddish pips with orange inner glows represent some vague idea of bandit/pirate/rogue/whatever settlements. I'm still unclear as to what even I intend of these, and whether they'll stay red or change to brownish-orange (or maybe even blue-grey in one case).

By size:
The sizes come in three variations: 30px, 20px, and 10px (at the original resolution of 5100x3300px)
For the brownish-orange pips, the size represents mostly just the size of the represented city/whatever
For the blue-grey pips, the size represents mostly the importance of the military installation and/or it's resident forces.
The red pips, at the moment, only come in the 10px variety, but they represent a rough mix of the two variations according to size listed previously.

...I think that makes sense. If not, let me know.

The main reason I didn't include a legend with them, yet, was lack of time, though I'm still debating whether I'll implement one and if so, how. If I do, I think it might be separate from the cartouche, possibly in the open ocean space at the middle left.

A secondary reason for not including them, though, is that once labeled, the colours would be mostly explained by the few of each number labeled, and I'd hoped the size was reasonably self-explanatory.[/color]

I've got a couple ideas bouncing around in my head for a new cartouche and/or legend for the pips, but it'll probably be shaky on how much I get done in the next week or two.

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-asp