your map size preference

[Chashio]

Depends on what I'm working on; if it's for myself I usually consider the projection dimensions plus however much of a border I want to include (which can be quite huge if I'm being artistic), and then decide if it's for print or digital display and how large. But I don't usually confine myself to standard sizes for convenience unless I'm fitting it to a frame I've already built or found. If I'm just doing a rough sketch for later cleanup, I try to work with my screen/PS Workspace resolution so that it fills the space at 12.5/25/50% zoom.

So, um... I guess I don't have a preference. =]

[Vellum]

Ruff, This was what I was leaning towards as a starting place for either a small encounter area (8.5 x 11 or 11 x 17) and then the larger 20 x 30 for a world.

Chashio, I know absolutely nothing about projection or how it applies to world creation. I assume this is latitude and longitude lines placed on the map?

Thanks to you both for giving some guidelines. Let me backup a bit and explain what prompted this question. I started the first map as a tear tutorial, follow the instructions map as an exercise to learn PS. This was set up as 1024 x 1024 (tear actually reduced this to 512 x 512) but I found that as I got to the point where I wished to add text or other info it seemed to me to be too small (take into context here I have very limited digital experience) for a viewable map. Schwartz asked me to show a better resolution in the thread which I couldn’t do, either because I didn’t get PS to save the web jpeg correctly or the image was actually to small to begin with. So my though process here was, OK these things can be either for print or web viewing, the little I picked up reading a book and browsing the guild site was that 288/300 seemed to be the norm for print applications and 72 for web. So lets look at an example here then, say I wish to follow the tear tutorial but use a 20 x 30 world size that would have the option for either web or print. If I set this up in PS I end up with a 9000 x 6000 pixel w/ 300 ppi. If I follow tear’s guide of reducing the image by half (for better sharpness/clarify of final image I assume) we end up with a 18,000 x 12,000 image to start with. This seems exceeding large to me but is this how it actually happens for you folks who actually have stuff printed up? I’m trying to get a better handle on software aspect of things here.