New and looking for critiques

[Cloudbourne]

Hello,

I'm going to say I'm new to map making but I have made several maps in the past.
This is the first map I feel came out looking the best.
I used a few tips and tutorials from this site and I'm a bit nervous at my rivers.

So here is my first map that I feel pretty confident in.

Mainland.jpg

[maxsdaddy]

Welcome to the Guild! Kudos for posting a map on your first post. Rep. No critique from me, I'll leave that to the professionals.

[Riggamorphus]

Hello Cloudbourne,

Welcome to the guild. I like the colors and over all presentation of your map! The bigger type is a little wavy or is that your intention? I think your rivers look good. What software are you using? Also, don't be afraid to put them closer together.

rigg


rigg

[Cloudbourne]

Thanks.
I did this all in Photoshop except the text. The text I did in Illustrator.
The curvy text is done purposely, trying to get it to kind of wrap around the land a bit.
My main goal was to make all the text readable.

Thanks for the feed back.

[rdanhenry]

I like the font. Other than going a bit overboard with the wavy text, I'd say it is looking really good.

It wouldn't take long for a name like "Sunsstone" to become "Sunstone", although an older spelling might not keep up with pronunciation.

[Lukc]

The map as a whole seems fine, it's clear and shows what you want to show. BUT: the distortion on the sea text is a bit much - I don't think it really adds much to the map while at the same time grabbing attention and shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!" to the detriment of the rest of the map.

Another thing - you have a Western and Eastern Vale. A vale is, basically, a valley - not usually a feature associated with seas.

[Lukc]

The map as a whole seems fine, it's clear and shows what you want to show. BUT: the distortion on the sea text is a bit much - I don't think it really adds much to the map while at the same time grabbing attention and shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!" to the detriment of the rest of the map.

Another thing - you have a Western and Eastern Vale. A vale is, basically, a valley - not usually a feature associated with seas.

[rdanhenry]

A sea is just a big valley filled with water.

[Saring]

This looks really good.

I do agree with a few of the others though. The Vales were a little confusing. The term typically refers to land.

Also, I don't know if this is just me, but when I zoom in to look at the details, the image pixilates and I have a hard time telling what some of the details are.

Far better than I can do, and great job for a first post.

[Hai-Etlik]

To curve text on a map you generally want to use a simple "text along path" type feature (Adobe has weird names for everything so it's probably called something different) Envelope deformations like this distort the actual letters which does not help readability. Adjusting the letter spacing is also a good technique and sometimes you might want to get down to nitty gritty adjustments to glyph positions. Inkscape can do this fairly easily so I assume there's a way in Illustrator. There is also some very tiny black text in places that is completely unreadable.

You have some odd rivers, including a lake that has rivers flowing out of it to opposite coastlines and another that seems to be flowing across the terrain gradient for an incredible distance. Rivers flow downhill, and they take the most direct coarse. Places where a river diverges into separate streams are short in distance and in duration, and they are rare except at the mouths of some rivers.

Also the scale seems off. You seem to be spanning between the polar ice caps, and are preserving compass bearings (Based on the presence of the compass). That implies you are using Normal Mercator as a projection, and that this map probably covers more than half of the planet's surface. That also means that if the planet is Earth sized (And there are significant problems with going very far from this), this continent is something like the size of Pangea. Judging by the details though, it doesn't look like it would even be the size of Australia, in fact it looks more like an island than a continent.

Assuming it works with what you are aiming for with this map, I'd drop one of the icecaps, and maybe the compass.