Urovangia

[paulbhartzog]

Great work!
Most of the maps on wikipedia are vector maps (svg), is yours?

This looks so incredibly functional, like you'd get it from some functionary if you stopped at a visitor's center while on vacation. :-)
It's so minimalist in line and font and texture.

Looking forward to the next one.

[Hai-Etlik]

It looks very nice, but there are some technical problems.

For a large scale map at high latitudes like this, you wouldn't use an equidistant cylindrical projection (Where the graticule is a simple square grid), and if you did, everything would look stretched out east to west. Also the scale bar would be inappropriate in equidistant cylindrical as the scale would be inconsistent depending on the direction. Which is why large scale maps are normally done in regional specific projections, such an azimuthal, conic, or transverse cylindrical. When you get down to a sufficiently large scale, the differences between such projections fade away for the most part and you just gets something like a rectangular grid spaced out more north-south thant east-west. I wrote a tutorial on making an approximate version of such a graticule here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ules-Made-Easy

Also, although it's not strictly "wrong" to measure from longitude from 0° to 360°, the convention is to measure from -180° to 180° and I think it light look a bit better if the river names curved to follow the rivers, and maybe had the letters spaced out slightly.

[Daelin]

@paulbhartzog
No, I did copy the style straight from Wikipedia, but I did the map in Photoshop. The color-coded elevation is drawn with paths, though, so it's kinda vector-based.

@Hai-Etlik
Your comment is interesting. You sure have your argumention in order.
I would just like to point out two things:
* 'mf' is a fictional unit of measure - I don't even know what it's short for. So the map being "large scale" is really an individual choice. I got the inspiration from here, and I imagine that the size of Urovangia is about the same as Liberia. And you wouldn't use map techniques that take the curve of the planet into account with that small a country, or would you?
* Also, the -180 to 180 thing was actually something I thought about while making the map. Again, you could argue that since this is obviously a non-existent country on a fictional planet in some other universe, the math is also different, and on this world, they use 'metrical' angles, where a circle is 400 degrees, so the measurement would be from -200 to 200. Nifty, huh?

As to the rivers, you're right, that would have looked better.

[Hai-Etlik]

Your comment is interesting. You sure have your argumention in order.
I would just like to point out two things:
* 'mf' is a fictional unit of measure - I don't even know what it's short for. So the map being "large scale" is really an individual choice. I got the inspiration from here, and I imagine that the size of Urovangia is about the same as Liberia. And you wouldn't use map techniques that take the curve of the planet into account with that small a country, or would you?

The thing is, you've put in a graticule, and a graticule implies certain things. For one, regardless of the the size of the planet, it covers a quite small part of the surface of the planet, which makes it a fairly large scale map (Yes a lot of people think this sounds backwards but there's a perfectly good reason for it and it's part of standard cartography jargon). That does mean you can get away with ignoring some aspects of curvature in a fictional map, but not all of them.

If you measured the graticule on that Liberia map, you would find that the meridians are very slightly closer together than the parallels. That's because Liberia is very close to, but not quite on the equator. Urovangia is at a much higher latitude which means that the meridians have converged significantly. At 55.5 gradians, the meridians would be 0.4746 as far apart as the parallels.

This map, by the same Wikipedia user, demonstrates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ba...tic_Sea-en.svg

* Also, the -180 to 180 thing was actually something I thought about while making the map. Again, you could argue that since this is obviously a non-existent country on a fictional planet in some other universe, the math is also different, and on this world, they use 'metrical' angles, where a circle is 400 degrees, so the measurement would be from -200 to 200. Nifty, huh?

Fair enough, though I wouldn't say "the math is different". In fact that's a way of measuring angles that has been used IRL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian Gradians and Degrees are both essentially arbitrary units, while the math underlying them is the same. That's why mathematicians generally use radians (The arc length on a unit circle subtended by the angle) to measure angles.