I created this map for a project in my cartography class. Requirements were that it was monochrome and with a scale equal to or larger than 1:100,000. At the bottom of this page is my map taxonomy.
I knew I wanted to map a geography that had land and water. I have an interest in Eastern Europe and Russian and I also wanted to take advantage of the worldwide data of OpenStreetMap, so I started my search looking at ports on the Black Sea, searching for a port city or bay with visually pleasing geography. I decided on Burgas because of the nice shape of the bay and dimensions that fit within our scale range. At some point I would like to make a map of the Kerch bridge, but the proper scale for that would need to be around 1:200,000.
I had three main inspirations for my map. The first was Jakob Listabarth’s “Lost Treasures of la Isla del Coco,” which was a Monocarto 2019 winner. I tried to emulate the concept of his waterlines, and also noticed all of his ink was at 100% opacity, which was a constraint I liked and put on myself. While at first seeming like a constraint, I actually think it helped me be more creative with other variables like line width, patterns, and spacing. I also really like the look of just the dark brown ink, without any other shades or tints of the brown. One of the last things I did was lighten the paper color that made up the ocean in order to establish a clearer foreground and background. This was a concession that I felt helped the design of the map, without breaking the purity of my color too much.
I also looked at maps of the black sea made by the Army corps of engineers that are located in the library of Bi Hall (our science building on campus). I modeled my scale bar and design of my layout on these maps. I enjoyed looking at these large paper maps. I also looked a lot at the Swiss historical maps for waterline and road hierarchy ideas.
I stumbled upon my color scheme as I was working on the project, but I knew I was looking for a dark ink color that was not black. Once I found the ink color I found an off-white shade that went well with it. I am happy with the colors and style they bring, but after quite a few hours on the final night of work I got the idea that the map looked kinda fleshy/made out of skin, and now that is all I can see. Because I restricted myself to only 100% opacity of the ink color, I tried for a while to get a texture imported and see if that would give me some more options. I never was able to figure that out, which is fine because I was able to create enough variation of lines and didn’t need to show hillsides or contour.
The locator map of the Black Sea was the biggest pain in terms of design and layout. The bay is so small compared to the shape of the Black Sea that it needs to be big to see, and there is also not a great place to put it on the map. I experimented with putting it outside the map, next to the scale bar, but ultimately stuck it in the top-right corner, accepting that it might look like a landform at first glance. I made it as simple as I could.
The one detail that I am not happy with but did not fix is my knockout behind town names that extend over the water shade of paper. Besides photoshop, I could not think of a way for the knockout to be land color over land, and water color over water, within the same word. This instance only exists four times and is very subtle, but I would fix it if I had time.
