So I'm writing a longtime alternate history that focuses on an alternate Spain and as part of that I ended up doing a population map for around the year 1150. The map was made with a relief map I found at Data-Spain and then a lot of different layers and layer styles with a pattern of "old paper" as the base. The cities were a simply multi pointed star and a box and I just added a bevel and drop shadow. City text was made with a simple outerglow of black at normal with some adjusted settings. The key is pretty simple: from lowest to highest population colors are:

Red
Orange
Green/Yellow
Dark Green
Light Blue

PopulationMapAltSpain.jpg