Concept World Map (mmorpg)
FarsightX3
Traveler
I feel like I go through 1-3 iterations a year on this map lol. I have always wanted to re-design my world map to make it have a more natural flow without it looking "patchy" or things that just don't belong. At the same time, I have to adhere to zone design for development purposes. It makes things tricky.
I decided to that this portion of the classic world is going to be dwelling in a transitional biome of taiga and temperate.
I was inspired to make the mountains ranges better. With much inspiration from a FB poster's Spectrum maps, on how he complimented the hills under the mountains, making them foothills. It was a brilliant move and makes the mountains come more alive.
I hope this looks better than my previous versions of the map.
Click to view High Res Version
I decided to that this portion of the classic world is going to be dwelling in a transitional biome of taiga and temperate.
I was inspired to make the mountains ranges better. With much inspiration from a FB poster's Spectrum maps, on how he complimented the hills under the mountains, making them foothills. It was a brilliant move and makes the mountains come more alive.
I hope this looks better than my previous versions of the map.
Click to view High Res Version
Comments
On my cell, can only load the small one above. Looks good.
The only think I do not like is the size of the mountains. They are way too big compared to the other symbols. Other than that, it all seems fine to me.
It looks like a good composition. However, my (admittedly old and not well maintained) eyes have problems tracking on the map. The big mountains are a good pull, but everything else on the map reads as a sea of noise to me. I suspect that it's mostly because of the low-contrast darkish blue-green textures combined with tiny dark trees and small details that don't pull my eye around the composition. Note that those comments are for the size-reduced thumbnail and also for a somewhat larger full-screen preview. Looked at up close, things look reasonable, but that huge amount of detail just fades out when the whole thing is viewed at once.
Cartography (art in general, but cartography specifically) is about abstraction: reducing the thing to an essence of the original that meets your goals. It's why artworks aren't photographs: art has the important things highlighted and the unimportant things reduced; a photograph just keeps everything. Too much detail just becomes clutter after a bit.
A common problem that folks tend to have is putting too much on a single map because it can be difficult to have multiple maps. Folks have gotten really used to things like the various map applications that seem to offer infinite detail and they want to put all of that on a single map. That doesn't really work, though, because a critical part of map applications is automated abstraction. Someone tagged various features for importance and the application only shows those features that are appropriate for the zoom. You don't see alleyways marked on a map of the world because humans can't process that level of detail all at once.
One thing that you might try is to reduce the contrast on the base terrain textures even further because that will reduce one major source of detail when viewed from a distance. The way that CC3 does bitmap fills is by repeating the textures, which results in obvious patterning when zoomed out. Reducing the use of a single texture can also help, but I think that contrast reduction is your best bet for a first step.
Again, the comments above apply to my general review of the map and may not have any bearing on your intended use of the map.
I am thinking that the issue with the scale of the mountains has more to do with the scale of the map. When I go to your larger image and zoom in, everything seems proportional. But, when you deal with the large zoomed out map, then you have these tiny symbols you can't see and these giant mountains that dominate the image. So, it is less than the mountains look too big, but rather looking at the image from a "distance" makes everything else look too small.
If that is the cause, then it really depends on how this map will be viewable as to how it will look. Zoomed out image that only takes up a small amount of screen space doesn't look that good. The larger image that fills up most of my screen, looks a lot better. Zoomed in looks great. Some styles just don't work great for larger maps because you lose the details. When deal with larger maps with detailed styles, I will sometimes increase the size of the smaller objects. But its probably not worth it for you. Just make sure that any collectors map is printed big.