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Thread: I'm Making a Nautical Chart! (sorta)

  1. #1
    Guild Adept KMAlexander's Avatar
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    Map I'm Making a Nautical Chart! (sorta)

    I debated putting this in General & Misc, but since it's barrows heavily from modern styles, I figured this would be the best place.

    With the launch of the fourth book in my series coming soon, I decided to offer up another map of the area for my readers, this time focusing on the archipelago just west of the primary location. (There's a narrative reason for this, but this is a forum for map talk, not book talk!) I decided I liked the idea of creating a nautical chart, but since city-states populate the world, it makes more sense that a chart like this would come from volunteer sources. So the entire map isn't filled out. There's plenty of "Here Be Monsters" sort of areas, and some of the data is... er, debatable. It'd be like if NOAA said, "here's a chart with some strongly worded suggestions," and had no real teeth (the U.S. or Canadian Coast Guard) to back it up.

    Here's where I started. Using Illustrator for the base and then roughing it up and adding texture and such in Photoshop.

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    Guild Adept KMAlexander's Avatar
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    I didn't like my coastlines, they were too vectory for me. So I went back and re-did them. Also, my compass was all out of wack compared to the rest of the text. So I revisited it as well. (Basically just ripped off NOAA's design and modified it slightly.)

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    Here's where I'm at right now. I zoomed out a little bit. Added a lot more little icons and such. (Again, borrowing from nautical charts.) Not sure how detailed I'll go with the landmasses. As I'm still trying to figure that out a bit, most nautical charts are much smaller in scale than this is, and as a result, they tend to get detailed—not sure how important that is for this piece.

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    Happy to hear any thoughts or feedback or opinions, or whatever. Also happy to share my process or answer any questions.

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    Plan is to keep updating this as I go along. It's designed for the web, I'm not going to try and cram this into a paperback book.

  5. #5

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    I love how you always explore historical styles ! This chart look perfectly in line with the NOAA iconic style, even if I would tend to think your coastline is a tiiiny bit too bold here, but I'm really nitpicking there ^^'

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    Thanks, Misty!

    I keep going back and forth on the landmass border. For a map serving a story I think the landmass is probably more interesting than the sounding marks or rock locations. So I right now I'm highlighting it a bit more.

  7. #7

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    This is super cool. I love those old nautical charts, and I really enjoy how you have little details in the notations.

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    Thanks, jshoer!
    Most of that text it initially came from NOAA charts, but then I modified it to fit my books' world a little better.

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    Here's where I'm at right now. Redoing the cities a bit. This is a deviation from the chart-style and more of a personal stylistic choice. (Though as much as I find Myriad super boring, it's forever readable and I'm going to stick with that since charts do.) Might just do a mask outline for the city names vs. cutting out all the streets on the grid—like you can see here.

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  10. #10
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    Like this:

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