Reply With QuoteI prefer the first one, maybe the linework is too thick on the second. You should also add roads, but I don't know how far back in time you want to go, it might be hard to find the roads of the 18th century.
Davidson County, North Carolina
This may be a bit different to most maps that are posted (I'm new here, so I wouldn't know too well).
A brief backstory- I do a bit of genealogy and there is a large concentration of my ancestors who lived around Davidson County in NC (it used to be bigger, now there are other smaller counties around there, in addition to Davidson). As a result, I often find documents or brief excerpts which mention certain towns or places around the area.
As such, I decided to make a little map to help me out. I should probably mention that I used google maps heavily in order to help me out (I for the most part just traced over it), which I must imagine is frowned upon here (I may come back and make it by hand at some point too).
Here is my map as of now:
feezor2.png
I'm undecided whether I want to have some sort of coastline- here is a version from before which had one (excuse the unfinished look)
feezor4.png
Any advice or opinion is much appreciated!
I prefer the first one, maybe the linework is too thick on the second. You should also add roads, but I don't know how far back in time you want to go, it might be hard to find the roads of the 18th century.
Yeah, the lines are a bit thick. I want the map to be around the Civil War, maybe a bit later, and there are actually quite a few maps of the County around, albeit either a bit too early or late to when I want to make my map. I'm planning on adding roads and maybe some other landmarks such as mills and churches.
On the Google maps issue; the problem is that they have some weird copyright/licensing issues on their maps. OpenStreetMap has no such copyright problem and so it's a safer source to use.
As far as the map itself goes, I like the one with coastlines (although a thinner one might look nice). But I'm rather partial to ink-on-paper type maps so I'm a bit biased.
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I think I would go with the lines, thinner (actually quite thin) as has been mentioned and dark blue in color. I can't tell if the lines you used were black or a dark blue on the pic you posted. You have a nice start, though.
Thanks for the suggestions, guys.
Google Maps isn't an issue, I just thought that maybe people on here would see it as less effort or something. I don't plan on copyrighting my map or anything like that, it's just for personal use. I'll make sure to try out a thinner coastline when I have some time (this is just an idle project). Currently working on the roads, with which I'm using a map from 1910 for reference (I could post that one too, if anyone's interested).
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