Hello! I'm a new poster here at Cartographers' guild. I've been designing settings for years now for homebrew RPGs, but am now embarking on a new project. I run a history Podcast about migration in America (check it out), and am beginning a new project to do a kind of collaborative storytelling project via Podcast in a fictional setting. I am well into designing that setting, and most of my time has been focused on fleshing out the cultures, languages, economies, population, wars, politics, history, etc. Getting ethnolinguistic-specific fertility/mortality statistics at the regional level for a continent is a technical challenge that I'm enjoying, but is taking some time. For some details on my thinking on the population geography of a Medieval setting, see here.

Aaaaanyways. All that to say, my project will be outward-facing and have an extraordinary level of detail underlying any visualizations. While I have some reasonably good Photoshop cartography skills, I want to do better, and specifically want to make sure that at least some of the visual components to the Podcast will be on par, in terms of quality of production, with the Podcast itself, and with the more data- and story-driven world-development. Whew. Okay. So. I have a map already. Here's one presentation, showing the physical map, as well as a few major regions:

Click image for larger version.  Name: Major Regions.png  Views: 64  Size: 528.3 KB  ID: 85029

I'm using Photoshop, everything is in lots of separate layers that can be edited.

Broadly speaking, I want a better-looking map. I'm open to working from this file, or starting entirely from scratch with a new aesthetic. I would love to be able to produce something like this, or this, or this, or this.

I have time; not intending to really release the project until the autumn. I'm also open to other suggestions on how to make a visually compelling cartographic presentation for the project.

A few notes: the area presented is about 1.8 million square miles, so a bit bigger than the European Union, smaller than Australia, larger than India, etc. Population ranges from 11-16 million people. That should give you a sense of scale/detail. If I were to mark every urban cluster of 10,000 or more on the map (probably won't mark all, but, eh, maybe I will), it would be 30-40 labelled cities. Add in some other marked places and you can run up to maybe 60 marked human settlements. I've then got probably 100-150 general geographic labels for regions, land and water features, etc. If it were possible to make a sufficiently big and high-res map to include all of this in one beautiful piece of cartographic magic, that'd be swell.

So. Would love feedback on how to improve what I'm doing, tips on how to get an aesthetic somewhat like what I've linked to, etc!