The Middle Border States

[snodsy]

Just finished this map for a Civil War book to be published this spring. Shows battlefields, camps, prisons and towns during the civil war. Lots of labels. Done in Illustrator. MiddleBorderChrisFinal-01.jpg

[Tom]

Nice! I would really like to see it in color , but I presume they needed in B&W for print, right?
I'm a noob with illustrator...

[Diamond]

That's beautiful work - I do love a well-done grayscale map! If you want a little criticism, there are four square-ish territories in southwestern Missouri whose names are illegible; they look like they have a white stroke around white letters.

[snodsy]

Thanks Diamond, that a mistake, I'll need to get that fixed before printing.

[Sharpes]

Great job snodsy! Is the setting like alternate history or is it based on historic fact? If you don't mind me asking, what font(s) did you use for this? They're quite nice and readable.

[snodsy]

Hey Sharpes;

This map is based on real history, it for a University Professor's book on United States Civil War.


FONT:
The stand-by classic font - "Adobe Garamond Bold" - abode is the best Garamond out there, there are some bad Garamonds with poor kerning and letter forms. The adobe one is one of the classic Baroque fonts. Sabon and Stempel Garamond are good ones as well. Also note back during this period (1500's) there were no BOLD fonts and italics were used separately. Small Caps and All caps were used instead.

Also never letterspace Upper and Lower Case letters too much. All Caps can be letterspaced.

If your looking for old style fonts a free one is the IM FELL Double Pica http://www.dafont.com/im-fell-types.font

Other Renaissance - Historical, Caslon Antique, Kennerley Old Style (my favorite), Schneidler, Dante, Centaur,
Trump Medieval is a good Baroque font.

[Sharpes]

Wow, interesting. Thanks for the link! I'm working on a basic atlas-style map atm and the font you used looks quite nice for when there's a whole bunch of town names or geographic features grouped together in a tight space.

Ah, sorry to be dumb, but what do you mean by letterspace? is that the distance between each letter? :S

[snodsy]

Yes Letterspace also known as KERNING is distance between letters. Distance between lines is known as LEADING. Good luck look forward to seeing your map.