Well it's the time of year again....let's talk about the Atlas Awards!

Quick intro for new members... the Atlas Awards are the Guild's 'Oscars', where we nominate and vote for the best maps created during the last year. All Guild members are encouraged to nominate and vote.

I will shortly be posting the nomination threads for our various categories, and nominations will be open for four weeks. But before I do so, a few notes about some changes for this year.

We're making some tweaks again in an effort to limit the amount of work involved, and to address some of the issues with a few of the categories. We asked for some feedback a few months back, and I want to say thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts. The CLs have discussed the comments and this is what we're going with this year...


Best Large area map (Space, World, Continental, Regional) - NOMINATE TWO
Since the beginning there have been problems with overlaps between the World & Regional categories. Every year, we have to tell people their nominations are wrong and they have to be removed. Additionally, the Space category in previous awards has often had significantly fewer entries than other categories. To address this, we're combining these categories into one, based on the area shown on the map. We recognise that this will be a heavily overloaded category, so we're asking you to nominate TWO maps, and there will be TWO winners. In other words, the first and second placed maps will BOTH get an award (if there's a tie at the top, only the tied first-placed maps will win).


Best Local area (City, Town, Village)
This is much the same as last year.


Best Small area (Building, structure, space ship, dungeon)
This is slight tweak on last year's award. Nominate anything that maps a small area.


Best Black & White Map
This is a new category for this year. We feel black & white maps are often disadvantaged against full colour, and this category hopes to address that. Maps can be hand-drawn or digital, but they should be almost entirely black & white, or monochrome.


Your favourite map from last year
This is a tweak on the 'Best Overall' map. The difference between 'your favourite' and 'best overall' is subtle, but we want to see the maps that you simply loved most from last year. For example, you might feel 'Map A' is technically superior to 'Map B', but 'Map B' ticks all the boxes for you and you can't stop looking at it. That's what we want to see in this category, and any style is acceptable.


We're trying to find the balance in these changes between a list of categories that covers most mapping styles, while not drowning the CLs in the work associated with the awards. We feel that it (somewhat) addresses the overlap between different awards, where the same maps could win multiple times. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but having more distinct categories may help give a more diverse set of winners this time. We'll see!

So, onto the nomination process. These are all the eligible contenders for the 2021 Atlas Awards...


VIEW ELIGIBLE MAPS


PLEASE NOTE...
On the thumbnails page, if you click directly on the picture, it will show you only the picture. However, if you click on the title below the picture, it will take you to the thread. When nominating a map, PLEASE include a link to the THREAD, not just the picture by itself. This will save the CLs much time and effort when it's time to set up the polls. So your nomination should look like this:


The sea of the 6 kingdoms by - JO -
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...170#post416170


Please nominate up to two maps for the 'Best large area' category, and only one map for all the other categories.
You cannot nominate your own maps.
Please keep all discussion to this thread. The nomination threads are for nominations only.
Nomination threads will close on Sun 14th Feb, and voting will start a few days after that, once we've compiled the poll.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here.