Kamol Sea Territory

[Onilyn]

This is for a story I'm working on. It's probably the fourth or fifth map I've done, I could use some suggestions.


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[Mouse]

Hello Onylin

That's a really nice bold map you've got there, with the potential to be dead attractive. But the thing that most hits me in the eye is the bright red grid, which probably isn't what you really want me to notice in the first few seconds of looking at it. You could remedy that by making the grid about 50% transparent, and maybe putting it behind the text? Some people use a tiny blur or subtle glow to blend it more with the background, or turn it black and very transparent indeed... up to you

[Onilyn]

Thank you Mouse. It definitely looks better without the bright red grid lines.

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[Mouse]

You're right. That's already looking much better

There are lots of other tweaks you could put into practice, but my understanding of GIMP is very limited, so my advice may be more confusing than helpful. Broadly speaking the coastline is a little on the pixelated and complicated side of ok, and we need to find a way to disentangle the text from the map symbols - the trees and the mountains and such. But as to how either of those things are done, I'm not the one to be able to say, and would prefer to wait for others who know a lot better than I do to be awake and online to assist you

[Mapsburgh]

Great start, I like the overall style you're going for here.

The main thing I would suggest working on is the labels. Right now you have a lot of overlap, both of labels onto map features (mountains, coastlines, etc) and of labels onto each other. I would reposition the labels to avoid conflicts as much as possible, and so some selective erasing of map features wherever they fall behind a label so that the label can be read clearly.

A few smaller points:
- I think your coastlines would look cleaner if you had the ripples only on the ocean side. It's especially confusing at the isthmus between the lake and ocean near Hammaslathi.
- The Bitterroot River and the river flowing south from Kincarradine both just seem to end -- they don't flow into anything. Is that right?
- Overall the rivers could be done with a heavier line, so that they stand out more.
- It's a bit weird to have the "Kamol Sea" label so huge -- it's bigger than the title of the map (which could stand to be bigger), and it's pushing the "N" off of the compass rose

Hope these ideas help!

[Rongar]

Greetings!

This is indeed a nice map you have here. A few things I noticed:

The grid, the scale on the border and the scale on the map legend are all not corresponding to each other in length. The scale on the border is also asynchronous, which shows at the bottom corners, where the yellow parts have to move around said corners to match up with the black parts. I'd suggest to redraw the border scale and make both the grid and the scale on the map legend the same length as that would greatly help measuring distances without having to look at the scale all the time - because in that case I know that one block of the grid is, say, 100 miles for example, since it's the same length as the scale.

As for the coastline, yeah, it's a bit thick and pixelated. but it's not too bad. I think you could do without the inner coastlines (the one on the land) and slightly (!) blur the rest. That should do.

And for the text you can either

select from alpha -> stroke selection with a soft, white* brush (not pencil) ~3px

or

duplicate the text layer(s), invert color and do a gaussian blur on the duplicate. Make sure that the original text layers are placed above the duplicated ones, though. This will give a slight glow to the text, which should make it a bit easier to read.

I think there are also specific glow filters if you have the additional filter package for GIMP installed, but I rarely use them.

(*or any color you like, but it should be a light-toned color in contrast to both the text color and the map color)