Quote Originally Posted by cantab View Post
Well it seems that GIS software is indeed very rarely used for creative mapping. It's perhaps not the best-suited software, since it tends to be oriented towards working with real-world data than creating stuff from scratch, and it's not geared towards "artistic" maps. Proprietary GIS software is costly, and it's only in the last few years that there've been quality free offerings besides GRASS (which even by GIS standards is perhaps tricky to use).
I've made occasional use of QGIS and GDAL in map making here at the guild, and I'm intermittently playing around with JTS.