Making a map, part 2
So, I spent another 4 hours working on the Flash map. Mills showed me some really great Flash maps for inspiration. They live at MapsOfWar.com. I like the History of Religion map and the Imperial History map for their use of the timeline and map to convey the information. I want the 1989 map to be similar. The MapsOfWar maps are great reference points, and good examples from which to glean style ideas.
I must say the hardest part of this project so far is the design. I’m no graphic artist, for sure. My attempts at creating something that looks cool are quite pitiful. I can copy and mimic other people’s works, but trying to put my ideas into something concrete is difficult. I should take some art classes.
Anyhow. I worked on Scene 2 of the Flash intro. Getting a decent looking timeline took little effort. Creating the hammer and sickle (the hamsickle) that moves along the timeline was a bit time consuming. At first I used an image from Wikipedia (it was free). But scaling that in the timeline made it distorted and choppy. So I redrew the whole thing in Flash so that it is made from vectors, and scales nicely.
Then I decided that using a single color map with the outline of the countries would work better than using the map I borrowed from the CIA (found it at the Library of Congress’ online map collection). So I started tracing the country outlines. Soon I’ll have a decent looking map of East Europe that I can copy and manipulate in different ways.
I also added some flash points to the timeline. They’re nothing fancy, and don’t correspond to any real data. I’ll get that stuff later.
View the progress so far.
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