Medieval Japan Settlement and World/Kingdom Classic Icon Previews

This post has our 1st & 2nd previews (two more previews coming!) of our monthly Patreon (sort of an opt-in subscription) icons. Each month our supporters pick a theme, then we make over 100 icons for that theme. We post the actual icons to backers on the last day of the month. Patrons also support our updates and new features added to Worldographer.

Our theme this month is “Medieval Japan”. For the classic world/kingdom icons preview, we took the Japan area of a world map we created a couple years ago and started placing the icons based on various on-line sources of medieval Japan, but had to give up–at this scale too many things would overlap and not give you a good view of the icons. So many are missing. (We could have drilled down to another map level, but then we might not have an area of the map that would show all the icons.)

Medieval Japan Classic World/Kingdom Map Icons Preview
Medieval Japan Classic World/Kingdom Map Icons Preview

For our settlement icons, artist/cartographer Keith Curtis has studied a lot of reference images to find the shapes, textures, and colors often used for buildings of the period. This research carried over and affected the design of the icons above as well.

Medieval Japan Settlement Map Icons Preview
Medieval Japan Settlement Map Icons Preview