January 2019 Challenge: The Dystopian Multiverse

[aeshnidae]

Thanks, Ilanthar!

Thanks so so so much for the suggestions, Tenia and Jerron! Those are really helpful. I hope to start adding locations very soon. I'm working on national borders now, although I'm not sure I'll wind up keeping them. We'll see how it turns out.

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[aeshnidae]

Now with locations. I'm interested in people's thoughts on the outer glow around much of the text. I don't love it, but without the outer glow it's harder to see the text on land.

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[bkh1914]

Wow, that's a basket full of dystopias!

Since you included Escape from LA, you might also want to include Escape from New York.

The outer glow is helpful, but I'm not a fan of the hard outer edge.
I don't know what the Photoshop options are, but in GIMP I like to duplicate the outer glow and give a blur, maybe 2-3 times the width of the outer glow. That softens the outer edge and I find that makes it more readable.

[Kellerica]

Coming along nicely, I like that hand-made bevel effect.

I'm not entirely sold on the outer glow either. At least on the screen I'm seeing this on, it gets a little messy in my eyes and it becomes a bit hard to read. The larger text on the ocean look great. This is just a thought, I don't know if it will actually work in this case, but have you tried going the opposite direction and having the glow be darker than the text, not lighter? I find that a black glow sometimes helps a lot more than a white one.

[XCali]

@aeshnidae

This is such a cool idea, it is real fun to see where everything played off.

[Ilanthar]

A map AND a compendium, nice !

[Tonquani]

This is looking great!

Have to agree the glow on the text makes it a tad easier to read over land, but much harder (for me anyway) to read anything over the sea. As per Kell's suggestion, have you tried a black glow over the land labels (not sure how you would deal with coastal labels where the label is partly over land and partly over sea...

[damonjynx]

Hey Jen,

Love what you've done with the place. Only problem is there are no Michael Moorcock, Eternal Champion references. Londra, Gran Bretan and Europe from The History of the Runestaff and London from the Jerry Cornelius novels...

[Tenia]

A great list. I dig the b&w-red colors, but I'm not convinced by the outer glow on the dark background too.
If you want some more locations, you may consider countries and islands visited by Gulliver, although their location may be controversial. Also, I know you have a lot of references in the United States, but A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic and probably my favorite post-apocalyptic novel.

[aeshnidae]

Thank you all so much for the feedback! I've been knocked out with a really bad case of the flu (but fortunately not the superflu, aka Captain Trips) and today is my first day feeling remotely human again so I decided to do a bit of work on the map. And I added Bird Box, since I watched it on Netflix while in a zombie-like state on my couch. Will it make more sense if I watch it again when I'm healthy?

The outer glow is helpful, but I'm not a fan of the hard outer edge.
I don't know what the Photoshop options are, but in GIMP I like to duplicate the outer glow and give a blur, maybe 2-3 times the width of the outer glow. That softens the outer edge and I find that makes it more readable.

That sounds like a great idea but I'm not sure how to go about it in Photoshop. Hmmmm. In the meantime, I've followed the suggestions about using a dark outer glow and I think that really does make a difference. I'm not sure why my targets are acting like they're translucent and will try to figure that out later.

I did add Escape from New York, per bkh1914's comment. I don't think I can add more dystopias to the US portion of the map, because it's pretty packed. But if there are more dystopias that aren't set in the UK or any of its former colonies, I'd love to add them!

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