Hello,
although I’m surely not a cartographic professional but a layman, I hope I’m allowed to post here…
I’d like to show my current piece of work. It’s not quite finished but in its final stages.
Basically, it’s a political world map which will be printed on a A3 sheet (420 x 297 mm or about 16.54 x 11.69 inches) to be laminated and used as a desk pad. It’s intended audience is… well, myself and a few people I know who are interested in maps, too.
The main purpose is to have a map that allows to easily ascertain (at least approximately) the geographic coordinates of places.
I think that for this purpose a cylindric projection is best, so I decided to use the equirectangular projection with standard parallels set to 35° N/S. For one thing, this configuration fills the space of an A3 sheet quite well and still leaves some space left for a legend. For another thing because I simply like this configuration aesthetically.
Moreover, I decided to set the spacing of parallels and meridians to 10°, plus dashed lines for the intermediate 5 degree steps.
The map was prepared using Geocart.
As a base, I extracted the map image from the CIA world map and reprojected it to equirectangular. A database for the nation labels is supplied with Geocart; for the city labels, I used the "Populated Places" database offered by naturalearthdata.com. That was actually some piece of work:
I converted the dbf file to a MySQL database, then I wrote a little PHP script that enabled me to semi-automatically select the desired data from the database and write them to a text file as needed by Geocart. First, I created a text file that included all capitals except those of Central and Eastern Europe – it’s quite crowded there, so I thought it might be better to drop the labels there in order to keep the map legible.
Then, to fill up the space, I used the "scalerank" property provided in the Natural Earth database to select more cities for all countries outside of Europe, and even more cities for a few very large nations (such as Canada, the USA, Russia…). Finally, I added a few special places that I wanted to have on the map for various reasons.
At this stage, the map was exported from Geocart as a PDF file to start the post processing using Affinity Designer.
I had to re-position a lot of labels in order to prevent that they overlap each other, or simply because it looked better in my opinion. Some labels were put on a vector path.
Although it’s not actually true, it feels like I’ve touched every single label on the map at some point or another to move it around and see what looks best…
By the way, I learned something important here: Rotated labels look dreadful. Even a slight curvature looks much better (I’ve used this technique e.g. for the Somalia label). When I now look at other maps, I see that this seems to be common knowledge, but as I’ve said above, I’m a layman so I wasn’t aware of this.
I also removed some of the city labels again (whenever I felt that a place was too crowded) and even dropped some nation labels or edited them to use an abbreviation. A list of these abbreviations was put the the map legend. To add a bit of "eye candy", I included a bathymetry and a shaded relief image (again, the source is naturalearthdata.com).
To give you a first impression I’m attaching a small image, the full sized version (JPEG image, 5031 x 3578, 4.3 MB)
can be viewed/downloaded here.
One thing I’m not sure about at the moment is the graticule.
Sometimes I think that I should reduce the line width or use a brighter shade of grey … but in the next moment, given that the purpose is to identify the coordinates, I think the lines should even be emphasized a bit.
On a side note: As you can see from the map legend, the intended audience is German. Nonetheless, all the labels use the english names. That’s mostly because I didn’t want to translate them all ;-) and it’s not that bad because all people who will receive this map understand English.
Although this map is intended for a very small audience that I know personally and is not intended to be sold or something, I’m thankful for any comments and criticism.
And, you don’t have to handle me with kid gloves. I want to get better at this so I’m ready to take a beating ;-) because that’s how you learn.
Kind regards,
Tobias
[h=4]Attached Thumbnails[/h]
أكثر...
although I’m surely not a cartographic professional but a layman, I hope I’m allowed to post here…
I’d like to show my current piece of work. It’s not quite finished but in its final stages.
Basically, it’s a political world map which will be printed on a A3 sheet (420 x 297 mm or about 16.54 x 11.69 inches) to be laminated and used as a desk pad. It’s intended audience is… well, myself and a few people I know who are interested in maps, too.
The main purpose is to have a map that allows to easily ascertain (at least approximately) the geographic coordinates of places.
I think that for this purpose a cylindric projection is best, so I decided to use the equirectangular projection with standard parallels set to 35° N/S. For one thing, this configuration fills the space of an A3 sheet quite well and still leaves some space left for a legend. For another thing because I simply like this configuration aesthetically.
Moreover, I decided to set the spacing of parallels and meridians to 10°, plus dashed lines for the intermediate 5 degree steps.
The map was prepared using Geocart.
As a base, I extracted the map image from the CIA world map and reprojected it to equirectangular. A database for the nation labels is supplied with Geocart; for the city labels, I used the "Populated Places" database offered by naturalearthdata.com. That was actually some piece of work:
I converted the dbf file to a MySQL database, then I wrote a little PHP script that enabled me to semi-automatically select the desired data from the database and write them to a text file as needed by Geocart. First, I created a text file that included all capitals except those of Central and Eastern Europe – it’s quite crowded there, so I thought it might be better to drop the labels there in order to keep the map legible.
Then, to fill up the space, I used the "scalerank" property provided in the Natural Earth database to select more cities for all countries outside of Europe, and even more cities for a few very large nations (such as Canada, the USA, Russia…). Finally, I added a few special places that I wanted to have on the map for various reasons.
At this stage, the map was exported from Geocart as a PDF file to start the post processing using Affinity Designer.
I had to re-position a lot of labels in order to prevent that they overlap each other, or simply because it looked better in my opinion. Some labels were put on a vector path.
Although it’s not actually true, it feels like I’ve touched every single label on the map at some point or another to move it around and see what looks best…
By the way, I learned something important here: Rotated labels look dreadful. Even a slight curvature looks much better (I’ve used this technique e.g. for the Somalia label). When I now look at other maps, I see that this seems to be common knowledge, but as I’ve said above, I’m a layman so I wasn’t aware of this.
I also removed some of the city labels again (whenever I felt that a place was too crowded) and even dropped some nation labels or edited them to use an abbreviation. A list of these abbreviations was put the the map legend. To add a bit of "eye candy", I included a bathymetry and a shaded relief image (again, the source is naturalearthdata.com).
To give you a first impression I’m attaching a small image, the full sized version (JPEG image, 5031 x 3578, 4.3 MB)
can be viewed/downloaded here.
One thing I’m not sure about at the moment is the graticule.
Sometimes I think that I should reduce the line width or use a brighter shade of grey … but in the next moment, given that the purpose is to identify the coordinates, I think the lines should even be emphasized a bit.
On a side note: As you can see from the map legend, the intended audience is German. Nonetheless, all the labels use the english names. That’s mostly because I didn’t want to translate them all ;-) and it’s not that bad because all people who will receive this map understand English.
Although this map is intended for a very small audience that I know personally and is not intended to be sold or something, I’m thankful for any comments and criticism.
And, you don’t have to handle me with kid gloves. I want to get better at this so I’m ready to take a beating ;-) because that’s how you learn.
Kind regards,
Tobias
[h=4]Attached Thumbnails[/h]
أكثر...