Jakub's Fantasy Map World

Hello and welcome to part 3 of the Youtubia series. As an extension to part 2 of the Youtubia series, which describes the continent's 16 provinces and their capital cities, I am pleased to announce that I have now released three electronic booklets for climate data for each of the capital cities on the Youtubia continent for digital download.  So what are the three types of electronic booklet? The three variations of the Youtubia climate data booklet are as follows: The climate data table booklet   provides a full, detailed overview of climate patterns in each of the 17 provincial capitals, including record high and low temperatures, with both metric and imperial units used for temperatures and rainfall.  The graph version booklet (in metric) provides a simple, visual graph overview of temperature and rainfall, as well as total precipitation figures for each of the provincial capitals, using European units such as degrees Celsius for temperature and millimetres for rainf...

Over the last few months I found this really interesting website called the Cartographers' Guild , a large community forum where people go to share their fantasy map projects and post interesting tips on how to improve their fantasy map drawing skills. What particularly interested me on this site was a post from one of the community members there on the forum about the "Eriond" fantasy map project that they were working on, which featured a tutorial on how to create photorealistic fantasy maps in the GIMP program. This would prove to be of big use for the Youtubia fantasy map project that I am currently working on.   At an important time where I am currently working on my business idea, I believe that it is important for me to be part of a place where I can share my ideas and be able to build business relationships with other like-minded people in the fantasy world.  Therefore, I have decided to join the Cartographers' Guild forum and I hope to be able to post my fan...

Hello, and welcome to part two of the Youtubia project. In this post, I will be exploring the subject of the continent's provinces.  What are provinces? As described in part 1, the Youtubia landmass aims to put different content creators on a map as if they were cities, and so each of the continent's provinces are named after different topics that are covered on YouTube.  The Youtubia landmass is divided into 16 different provinces, which work in a similar fashion to real-life countries. Each province has a capital city (two in the case of the Arts Province), where the seat of the provincial government is located. The provinces are governed differently to each other, with different road signs, postcode systems, currencies and legal systems, as well as being located in separate time zones.  Below is a map of the provincial boundaries along with the locations of each of the provincial capitals, as well as the names of the oceans on which the coastlines of the provinces are ...

I would like to use this blog post to explore something that is slightly different to fantasy map creation, but still blends in nicely with the theme of this blog by providing a review of wellness-related products in the virtual gaming world. For those who are unfamiliar with the site, Slowroads.io is a web-based driving simulator made by Anslo that aims to provide a relaxing driving experience, and it uses some interesting software engineering quirks, such as using AI to generate a continuous set of landscapes. Slowroads offers two maps, the "Hills" map (which is fictional, but takes inspiration from the landscapes seen in the north of England) and the "Off World" map (based on Mars), however, for the purposes of this post, I will be using the "Hills" map to review the simulator since the user experience with both maps is fairly similar.  Upon accessing the landing page for the simulator, the one thing that I was fascinated about with respect to the look...

The beginnings of the project... It is a pleasure to announce a new personal project that I will be working on for the next couple of months, called the Youtubia project. The project will combine a mixture of general work on the landmass, as well as some city map designs for cities on the continent. In this post, I will be focusing on the general properties that will underpin the design choices for the landmass in general.  For the first few parts of this series, and for the design phases of city map projects, I will be hand-drawing the landmass features and street plans on a sketchbook, before moving on to the digital graphics design of the map.   So, where does Youtubia take its name? The name for the Youtubia continent takes its inspirations after I have been regularly watching YouTube content creators of varying subscriber sizes ( ahem the example about beauty and wellness content creators in the second blog post   ahem ), and I imagined to myself, what if these ...

As you may be aware, one of my goals from this project is to provide a calm and relaxing take to fantasy mapping, and so I believe that it is important to explore the theme of aesthetics when designing maps as it plays a big part in this ethos.  Whilst I was conducting some research into the substance of wellness in cartography, I noticed an evolving pattern in map aesthetics over a number of years thanks to the work of some academic researchers. For instance, when I was exploring Alexander Kent's research papers on cartography aesthetics, I noticed a large amount of progress on the subject since the publishing of his first paper in 2005, when at the time, map aesthetics was not a commonly discussed topic and the academic community was beginning to explore the idea, to 2013 when a set of standards for improving map aesthetics was established.  I have also seen an increasing amount of interest recently in integrating social elements when we think about aesthetics in map designs...

As you may or may not know, I have been diagnosed with autism since the age of four, and during my spare time I would always look at a map or a world atlas, of varying ages and designs, picking out different locations in various countries and road numbers. It really helps me to cool down after a hard day in school or doing jobseeking. My love for fantasy map making takes me back to autumn 2012, where I would make a drawing of a fictional island called Freedman Island, which is geographically located off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand. The effort at the time was very basic, as I had used Microsoft Paint to produce the drawings, but I have started to enjoy the idea of designing maps electronically a lot more since then.  Fantasy map of Freedman Island In addition, I was always interested in video games for many years, particularly open world driving games such as Need for Speed - I could open an in-game map and sometimes I can see features that mimick real-life satellit...