Scale Matters

A map of northern Sweden, Finland and Norway. The coastline and border between the three countries has been drawn multiple times and different scales. The 1:110 million scale is much more angular than the 1:10 million scale. Bathymetry is shown off-shore. Lakes and rivers are also plotted along with a few settlements. The typeface of the labels and corresponding legend items mirrors the scale of the data plotted, with a more pixelated font used for the 1:110 million scale data, and a more refined version of the typeface used for the 1:10 million scale data. — Scale Matters: Illustrating the differences between the 1:10, 1:50 and 1:110 million datasets offered by Natural Earth. This was also a great opportunity to use the redaction typeface, which features variants at increasingly low resolutions. Made for day 22 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

projection	WGS 84 / Pseudo-Mercator. EPSG:3857
tools	QGIS, only
data	Made with Natural Earth
font	Redaction by Jeremy Mickel
comments	Nice idea, not the nicest of executions. All of the labels should be a bit bigger, the gray for the borders in the 1:10 million doesn't look great. Dashes of different lengths might work better. The borders and land items in the legend are for polygons, even though I'm only showing the exterior lines here, so these symbols should really just be lines instead of empty boxes. Love the font, though.
date	22/11/2025