First map, what can i do better?

[BluePhoenix175]

I will try to explain my thought process with the labels.

As I have said before this is a player handout for my D&D game. based on experience with my players and other (horrible) sketch maps I made for them, I noticed that they routinely confused, forgot, or lost unlabeled terrain features (mountain ranges, forests, lakes...). from a worldbuilding/story standpoint these features are important and I want to reduce the problems they were having with previous maps. thus my jumping headlong into this hobby to make better maps (and labeling). while working on it I got the idea of using the labels to suggest the size of the feature relative to other labeled things, and I wanted them a separate color so at a glance my players could identify them and get a sense of the scale. now I'm starting to get the feeling that I might be going about this the wrong way and it's most likely %50 of my problem. in all honesty, I'm not happy with the "glow" behind the text to contrast it, I have tried some with just outlining the text and not liked the results mostly because I will find a color combination that will work in the forest and not the desert and I have been trying to keep things uniform. it feels like all my label attempts are text with a map background, if that makes sense. I'm going to try a knockout background next. and my brother suggested I try to make it look like the icons and labels are a separate piece of paper/parchment/canvas that was stuck or glued onto the finished map.

TLDR: I'm trying to solve a problem my players are having by labeling everything.

I'm also looking for critique on things like the icons, key, compass rose, roads, shipping lanes, border, and nameplate.
Thank you, everyone, for all the advice it has helped me improve in this hobby as my progression of this map has shown I hope.

[waldronate]

What is you main map resolution? It's a little hard to tell much about the labels and icons at the published size except that they are indeed hard confusing without study.

Going with a simpler font might help with label readability. The ornate headline font that you're using here might (that's an iffy might) be workable if things were three or four times the size shown. The simple white text of the earlier version was much easier to read, but the actual font sizes were fairly small, while the font itself looked a bit out of place. Keeping the text size and position, but replacing the font on the newest version with a casual script font like Mistral (or one the the many available on the web), changing the text to white (maybe 75% opaque), and eliminating the background glows might make things look much cleaner.

The map key on the left is a useful addition. You note the presence of roads, but not shipping lanes. The shipping lanes seem busy and I'm not sure what they convey (they seem to connect everything to everywhere through roughly the center of the ocean area).

The icons are a useful addition, but the similarity of color, size, and shape (especially at this scale) makes them difficult to distinguish. Having icon size decrease according to city population and reducing the detail in the interior of the icons at each detail level (ultimately ending with a solid-color spot for the smaller elements). https://gistbok.ucgis.org/bok-topics...chy-and-layout has a chart about halfway down the document that shows how contrast in elements can be used to direct your attention to specific areas when first viewing the map. There are lots of other such discussions out there, but this is the first one that turned up in a search for "visual hierarchy". One thing that you can try is to color the icons by country or other important grouping attribute.

I admit that I didn't notice that you have a map scale at first glance. Adding a scale bar is often helpful to draw attention to the scale and to help with measurement. If the world is spherical, the size of the map suggests that an actual scale bar might not be universal due to projection, but it might not matter all that much.

The design of the wind rose is a bit overpowering in its current incarnation, especially with the scale bar so close by. The solid center seems very heavy.

[BluePhoenix175]

11.000in x 8.500in at 300ppi...
"visual hierarchy" so that's what it's called thanks. google-fu is no good if you don't know what its name is.
I was originally going to have the icons color-coded by country but I was running into the same problem as the text (my color/art skills suck). as for the detail that's really just to break up the uniform color.

I moved a couple of things around, adjusted the shape of the Capt icon, changed the wind rose reduced its size, and removed the shipping lanes. still need to find a better font. overall not much progress.



I spent some time just playing with Gimp's filters just to see what they do with the goal of finding something to use on the text, this is the result.



I think it is interesting and achieved an ok result on the text. the smaller font sizes are still a blurry mess but this might be a workable solution with a better font.

edit: I almost forgot, i removed the nameplate and reduced the border

[waldronate]

Finding the right terms to search for is the hard part of most activities.

That map is much easier to read (the larger size helps), even with that font.

I still find the icons being all the same size a little distracting. The black glow filter didn't help in this case, as the "Town" category is the now most visible because it has the most light pixels left against the dark background. Picking a simpler graphic style for the icons (e.g. star or X for capital, smaller circle for city (possibly with a circle around it to suggest walls), and a smallish simple dot for towns) might help. You can still use a textural interior to give it visual interest.

[BluePhoenix175]

so I finally got back to working on this.
stuck with a basic font and white text, I wanted something more visually appealing but it just wasn't working out.
next on the list is changing up the icons considering how much I struggled with the text I might just keep what I have now.