There are loads of illustration programs out there, offering different levels of control. In other words, the type of images you get when you use MSPaint. Vector images on the other hand are shapes created by computing distances between points and linking them up. Raster image quality is limited by resolution and do not scale up very well, but is very good for creating textured or very detailed images. Adobe Photoshop is a program that deals with editing raster images.

Most, if not all, images you see on the internet taken through a standard camera are raster.

When you take a photograph, the colours are encoded into very small pixels. Using Illustrator is a bit of a steeper learning curve than some of the pre-packaged map builders out there, but ultimately Illustrator gives a lot of control because it’s a vector-based design program rather than a raster-based design program. They do absolutely help of course, but map design, I’ve found, is a very different style of graphical art, and one that has its own unique problems and challenges. I drew (literally) on my skills with graphics and design to do this, so while the tone of this post may be sort of here’s-what-I-did-next I’m not going to assume you have a full understanding of design methodologies.

One thing I was sure about was that the graphics had to be of the highest quality, as close to an actual hired map-maker might produce. I know the program very well, so it was an easy decision for me to make, although I had never used it for something as detailed as map, with all of its coast lines and borders. There are a number of ways you can build a map, but I’m going to talk about the way that I used which was using Adobe Illustrator. I used grey for the sea to pick out the white land more. A ‘zoomed in’ view of Dali with map pins, hills and borders. (See more below on styling a vector map) The map used in my upcoming RINGLANDER novella THE BATTLE THAT WAS LOST ( available for preorder from Broken Binding – link to be updated soon). Here’s a closer view from the same source file, which has been edited in a slightly different style. It also contains a few countries within those continents: Rengas is a ring-shaped fantasy world comprised of 5 main continents: The main antagonists the Bohr want to conquer the lands they have yet to reach, and so maps in this world are revered and rare.

It helped me find a way to knit the story into the world very literally, as the main character’s heritage is to do with navigation. Briefly though, I wrote my debut novel over 7 years, due to a multitude of reasons, so the details of the world I had created were able to marinate for for a long time. I’ve tried to make this guide as general as possible, although I do use examples of how specifically Rengas came to be and how I built it. If you’ve landed here without knowledge of my book, fear not.

Fantasy world creator map