How do I make city dots
Hi everyone, I am currently making an alternate history map for a modern country, and was wondering how I make a city-dot label, for the dots that go next to the city names on a map. I want to make a nice looking one and was wondering if anyone can help. I don't want a plain old black dot however.
Well, you can use anything as a city marker but if you want to go with dots that's always good. First, what software are you using?
If you have any examples of city dots you like then please link those and I'm sure we can tell you how to create it.
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
* Rivengard * My Finished Maps * My Challenge Maps * My deviantArt
I use Photoshop. The best example is this...Originally Posted by Jaxilon
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/f/20...ma-d4v78q2.jpg
The square ones with the smaller squares, and the circles with the dot in the center.
These are both pretty much the same idea as far as making them.
Squares:
1 - Draw a square however large you want this to be, let's say 6 x 6 pixels and fill it with black.
2 - select the black and shrink by 1 pixel
3 - hit delete
4 - shrink by 1 pixel
5 - bucket fill with black
6 - deselect all and you pretty much have it.
The circle is the same thing just use the circle tool.
edit: You would probably want to autocrop and save your final as a brush so you can use them forever without having to recreate them from scratch each time.
“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden
Well, the second and third posts of my GIS tutorial covers the basics of doing this in QuantumGIS which has a specific tool for making such symbols: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-for-using-GIS
A vector graphics editor like Inkscape or Illustrator is also well suited to such a task. By using linked clones you'll have a lot of the same ability to tweak symbols after placement that a GIS has. They also generally have handy options like "Snap to Object Centre" to make drawing concentric shapes easy.
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