Sunday, July 4, 2010

Japanese Map Symbols

Ran across Japanese map symbols for the first time yesterday. Many of them are more modern than my pseudo-medieval needs, but I'm always interested in iconic representations. Here are a few I thought I might be able to use and that I found aesthetically pleasing:

Point of Interest

Monument

Fishing Port

Mine

Hot Spring

I took Wikimedia's svgs and turned them into pngs. These are all in the public domain, so if nothing else you can edit them to make your own map symbols.

5 comments:

  1. You should send this to Sword + 1. He's the guy who created Ruins & Ronin, after all.

    By the way, been living in Japan 10 years and have never seen those. They might be old or I might be ignorant, but either way they'd look cool on an adventure map.

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  2. Hey, thanks. I was hoping someone in Japan might weigh in on these. I'm thinking these might be more official symbols on what would be the equivalent over here of USGS survey maps.

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  3. Very cool. Strangely enough, I was using three dots to note points of interest on my sandbox maps until I realized it just made the map look cluttered.

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  4. Here in Denmark three dots are also generally used for sites of interest like ruins or other tourist attractions.

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  5. The point of interest and hot springs are used, but the others are much more unusual.

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