pyrnadon, you nailed the reason behind the building pattern exactly. I wanted to give the illsuion of detail, but at the same time, knew that mapping every building would be time-consuming, and unnecessary.
Everything in the map was done in Adobe Illustrator, even the texture effects. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to keep it vector-based.
The building pattern is just a pattern of circles, squares and rectangles, rotated at random angles. I didn't want to have them at right angles, since the city is organics in street plan, dictated by the hilly geography. Included is a screen shot of the pattern.
The roads are a trick that is easy to accomplish with Illustrator and similar vector and layer based graphics applications.
Each road is a single line. The entire leayer has an effect (group of characteristics) applied to it, so that evey object on the layer is treated as a single entity. Basically, there's a 3 pt. stroke of dark color, with a 1pt. stroke of light color on top. Since the effect is applied to the layer, it never shows an overlap, all the dark lines are laid down first, and the dark light lines laid down second. Intersections remain clear. There's more trickery involved with the alleys, since they are of necessity smaller roads. Likewise Circles and Squares and other gathering places are achieved by careful placement of layers.
So the layers are (If I recall correctly), top to bottom:
Plazas (shape of plaza with light fill)
Narrow roads (1pt light stroke)
Main Roads (double storke 2pt light over 4 pt dark)
Narrow Roads Outline (Copy of Narrow Roads layer, but 3pt dark)
Plazas Outline (Copy of Plazas, but with 2 pt stroke.)
Buildings Pattern
This gives the illusion of contiguous paved areas outlined by a dark line.
I hope that made sense. It's one of those things that's much easier to show than to tell.
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