Greetings, my fair cartographers, geologists and god-wannabes. I am Gus, and according to specialists, I am a new user of the forum. A quick overview of my life so far:
A brazilian by sheer luck and curious by vocation, I am the kind of guy who is always trying to find new interests. I try to keep a wide scope try to keep a wide scope of interests, while trying to keep a certain degree of normalhood. I like sports, movies, games, Marketing (specialy good, catchy ads), Cuisine (italian specialy. I'm a human Garfield), Music (I have to admit I have some realy weird tastes, listening from Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's symphonies to Wind Scene, by 8-bit instrumental and Terra in Black, by Ailsean.), Lost, House, Lost, Mental, Lost, Bones, Lost, Monk and tv shows in general. Curiously, I am not much fond of animes, but I like anime-based stuff, like gaming. Exception: The Melancholies of Haruri Suzumia. Highly recomended.
I found out about the Guild after a lot of chaos, hunger and screaming. You see, I decided to try this RPG-stuff and joined an online community, one of that ones without three-book-long rules. All you have to do is be creative, good at writing and have some common sense. This comunity is pretty nice and such, but I always felt that the stages given were lacking something. I decided to try to give it more dept. bad move! I wasn't aware that this was going to be my personal Lusíadas.
At the seventh day (well, more like seventh month... of the second year)... After beholding my creation... something was terribly wrong. There was a lot of information indeed, but it didn't make much sense. I figured out that it was lacking a stage, something more tangible than simple words... A map! lots and lots of Maps! Things I could rely on when defining the most important trade routes, or comparing how the country capital is close to an active vulcan.
I don't know if you are aware of this but, outside the Cartographers Guild, mapmaking tutorials are as abundant as naturaly-rich uranium. I think I tried all possible - and some invented - wrong keywords in at least 3 search engines. I was about to colapse into a hopeless mass of idiotic mud, when I stumbled upon here. "Horribly flabergasted" is not dramatic enough for descring how horribly flabergasted I was. Thank you, thank you fiercely.
Now I am here, presenting myself. This site is great - specialy the tutorials part. After seeing how many art you can bestow on a simple map, I realy felt like "hey, why didn't I heard of that before?". I hope that, with your aid, I might turn into a fully-fledged fantasy cartographer.
That leads to the suggestion of the title: It would be quite nice to have this "guild-approved stamp/seal/whatever", for those interested in publishing their maps outside the forum. Nothing extraordinary, just a simple image which the user can proudly ostentate when presenting his works to the target comunity of his map. I fall into this category: It would be nice to present a map to my RPG comunity and proudly say "The guys at Cartographers' Guild think this map's nice". They would think "But what the h*ll is this Cartographers' Guild?" Thankfully that neat little image would come with a clickable link...
Wax seals are definetly awesome. It would nice to make one for CG.