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Interview #748: Interview with Isaac Stewart, the man behind the maps of Mistborn and The Way of Kings, Entry #8
Trevor Green
You did the maps and artwork for Vodnik by Bryce Moore, which just came out recently. (For those of you who don’t know, Vodnik is set in Slovakia, which is a real place. Just, you know, FYI.) You told me a while back that designing a map of an existing place has some unique challenges. What were some of the things you came up against, and how did you overcome them?
(This is an excellent book. Read my interview with Bryce Moore here .)
Isaac Stewart
Designing the book, cover, and maps for Vodnik had some unique challenges, many of which Stacy Whitman (Bryce’s editor) and I have already detailed at these links:
How a Book Gets Its Cover: The Prequel (Click here for link.)
Design 101: How a Book Cover Gets Made Part 1 (Click here for link.)
Design 101: How a Book Cover Gets Made Part 2 (Click here for link.)
These were the first maps of a real place I’d ever done. The biggest problem we had to overcome with them was finding open source satellite images I could use as reference in making the maps. Google Fu came helpful here as Bryce used his Librarian powers to find maps we could legally use.
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