Map style feedback

[nAUTILUS]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for feedback and guidance for my worldbuilding project. I like maps and my worldbuilding is an outlet for that. The world is a roughly 1850 level of technology. The map style I'm going for is more like 1950 though because I like it more. Firstly I'm looking for feedback on my map style. I always feel like something's missing, it still seems to sterile to me. I like minimal margins, I'm talking about the content within the map itself.
The second part of my problem is more of a general worldbuilding problem: The end product I'm pursuing is an atlas of my entire world. I have set myself high standards of realism and thoroughness. If I have a real earth sized planet and civilisation the amount of work will overwhelm me. I'm looking to scale the population down without losing cultural and technological richness. Ideally I'm looking for a world with only a handful of small countries with lots of unexplored, wild land in-between. Just a bit of background: Spacefaring humans settle the planet, quickly build a high tech civilisation all around the globe. Some catastrophe happens over many hundreds of years leaving only small pockets of humanity left to re-explore the lost planet. The spacefaring past is mythical folklore, not actual knowledge. Natural factors (weather, maybe native fauna) prevent the humans from spreading all over the globe again at their lower tech level.
I'm afraid I don't really know exactly where I'm going with this post, I guess I'm just trying to put my thoughts into words and maybe get some helpful feedback and pointers on how to proceed. Thanks and have a good weekend!

[waldronate]

The most likely reason that the map seems sterile is that it seems to have no identifiable purpose. Is it for nagivation? Is it for illustration of a particular point? Is it a sidepiece for a geography text? It has lots of appropriate elements for an mid-century atlas image, but I just can't get a feel for the "why" of the map. Why are there no cities in the mountains? Why is it mostly a hypsographic (altitude) coloration with just a hint of shading? Why is the level of detail the same roughly everywhere? Why is there a single city in the corner?

[nAUTILUS]

Thank you for your reply. This map is meant to be an example of a page with the atlas I'm planning. Its purpose is the same as any atlas, to show a country's geography and settlements. I'm going for something like this : https://images.app.goo.gl/gJJkiasHbAAaoRmk8

[waldronate]

You've got the general form down, but it's (as it almost always is) how the details are arranged. Looking at the example map, the initial thing that jumps out at me is that the example is literally covered with labels. The labels are very approximately uniformly distributed across the whole map surface and the sheer quantity of text affects the appearance of underlying terrain, adding a texture that's not specifically part of the terrain, but affects the experience of the terrain. It's one of the reasons why running labels along features like valleys and roads and rivers can be so very useful: it emphasizes the feature without changing the direct presentation of the feature.
My initial experience of your map was that it's from a 1990s school atlas done for a specific country that doesn't like its neighbors much. It feels very sterile compared to the example because it's lacking details like the map frame (outside the neatline and grid) that would tie it to the page as well as lacking the subtle terrain texturing shown in your example. That sort of minimalism and hyperfocus screams 1990s to me.
The texture on the 1950s map is in large part due to the offset printing process. It's the same as with the lines. It looks like that plate was printed with an offset printing process (possibly simple CMYK, possibly a couple of process colors) and that technology requires some compromises that you don't get with more modern technology like dye sublimation. For example, it's hard to get very thin lines on uncoated paper, so the non-coastline areas are actually chains of dots. It's impossible to get solidly uniform areas of colors unless you use one of the primary inks, so dots are used instead and density plus overlap of dots composed of different inks combines with the page background color to give the final visual shade. Generally, the printer wants to avoid putting too many dots in the same place, so that type of screen process used to make the printing plates can have a big impact on the final experience of the map. The kind of paper stock used for the printing process makes a big difference as well: fully-coated stock keeps the individual dots nice and small (allowing smaller dots and higher effective resolution), while cheaper stock will let the dots spread, limiting the maximum effective resolution.

I like to define a map as artwork showing an abstraction of a particular place done for a particular client for a particular reason and in a particular medium. Yes, I'm very particular about that definition. Some folks like to produce a picture of a map, where the map is part of a larger composition such as the scanned page in your example map above. In your example map, the medium and even the context plays a big role in the final experience of the map. You're working digitally, so you have options that the 1950s folks didn't have and it shows in the final results. One of the hardest parts of making retro maps is recognizing the constraints of the media used by the original map producers (clients + artists) and adhering to those same constraints.

[nAUTILUS]

Dear Waldronate,

Thank you for the insight into the different printing processes, this is definitely something I need to look into more. The blank neighbouring country is due to me not wanting to have problems with adjacent maps and having to copy labels from over map to another. I will add a desaturated filter to any countries outside the area of interest.

[Peter Toth]

Hello Nautilus,

I'm not usually one who admires aesthetics in a map (preferring realism instead), but this one is both aesthetic and realistic in my opinion. It looks like you've used Wilbur for your mountains, and perhaps G. Projector to create the graticules. The city shown on the top right looks fabulous and I love your choice of colour for your altitudes (although I agree you should desaturate the non relevant areas of the map). The only thing I would suggest is to perhaps add labels to your map to show different information, such as the location of ports, ruins, resources, mines, etc. Everything else looks great, as if the map came straight out of an atlas. Bravo!

Peter

[nAUTILUS]

Dear Peter,
Thank you for your kind words! Do you mean labels as in little icons for ruins, ports, mines etc? I may add some of those.

[nAUTILUS]

map.png

I worked some more on the map and am now much happier with it. Some key takeaways for me were:
Resize the canvas properly
Clearer hierarchy of labelling
Place cities with more regards to the topography

Let me know what you think! I'd love to add some icons as previously suggested, but I am struggling with what exactly to include. Mines or ports are an obvious choice but I don't want to make a thematic map, more of a general purpose one. But icons add so much visual interest, I might just have to include some just for that.