Small village near a river in a hilly landscape

[Francissimo]

Looking at this map makes me want to live there. c'est tres bon. je l'aime!

Thx! the mayor of this town would be happy to hear that
For the app qgis i used, it is a free GIS software. It allows you to visualise vector or raster geotag data about real world. For exemple on this map i used a database about land use with existing roads, buildings rivers and topographic contour lines.. GIS softwares aren't very good for aesthetic purpose but it gives a quick and good basis for a map based on existing data. For exemple on that map i start with something like this on qgis,
ExQGIS.jpg
then export it in pdf to obtain the various layers of the map in vector format. There is quite some work to do after you obtain that pdf with raw data about your map, the shape of some layers like forest need to be reworked (in photoshop for me) for an aesthetic purpose. The huge advantage of that method is that you mainly focus on texturing, color choices and layer styles instead of redrawing all the elements of the map.

[Bogie]

Excellent map!!

[Diamond]

Great, great work. And it's awesome to see a new style here!

[Francissimo]

Great, great work. And it's awesome to see a new style here!

Thanks! this style was an attempt to mix traditonal modern GIS/ illustrator style maps with the aesthetic research and texture work that is present in fantasy maps

[felkis]

This is great mate! I work with QGIS also and my idea is to make work just like yours, from real places, using real data and making historical, cultural, and imaginary maps.

I also work with Postgis and Mapserver. My idea was to make a Web-based map library with theses maps. It would be amazing. But this is a long time project. IT would be great to have a group of people working together to make this happen.

[Francissimo]

This is great mate! I work with QGIS also and my idea is to make work just like yours, from real places, using real data and making historical, cultural, and imaginary maps.

I also work with Postgis and Mapserver. My idea was to make a Web-based map library with theses maps. It would be amazing. But this is a long time project. IT would be great to have a group of people working together to make this happen.

Happy you like the map I agree with you, having that kind of render with web mapping would be very cool, i really think gis apps would benefit to focus more on aesthetics now that it is a mature technology. I'm kinda noob in web maping and only use postgis to call data with qgis but i can already feel those things are the future of gis, i'm planing to get into it, so your idea of a (very?) long time project sounds really interesting to me! I'm not a pro in qgis but i've heard there is some plugins that allows a better controle on texture and colors. That could be an intermediate way to try to find the balance between a basic gis map done in a few minutes and a photoshop map made in hours. Have you tried qgis plugins to include better texture in the app? i'm planning to try that soon at work so if you know somes i'll be glad to hear!

[felkis]

That is nice Francissimo. We could start a project with these ideas. I heard about that plugin that includes better texture but I haven´t tried yet (Actually I´ll be testing after this reply hehe) . I´m working on a test project and any good results I´ll be posting here . It would be great to have some style tools in qgis that made random textures for building, for example, categorized texture styles, for similar elements. Like different types of roof, different types of land use. Maybe we can give the first steps to that.
Have a good day!

[Francissimo]

I'll be glad to work on such a project, the potential of a more aesthetic approach of web mapping is huge! Parallel to a qgis approach you may want to try mapublisher. Haven't tried it yet but it is a (paying) add on for illustrator that allows to have some GIS fonctions on illustrator. Maybe that's another way to work the aesthetic of geotag data. For me the main problem of doing maps in photoshop is that you loose all the advantages of geotag data, but photoshop is so powerfull when you want a nice render..

[ngm132]

This is an incredible map. It's so detailed. Do you work mostly in photoshop or illustrator? I agree with Slylock, I want to live there.

[Francissimo]

Thanks For this map i used 3 apps. First Qgis for a simple data visualisation, then photoshop for visual improvement and reworking the shapes of some layers and finally illustrator for labelling and symbols.