New and looking for critiques

[rdanhenry]

A sea is just a big valley filled with water.

[Saring]

This looks really good.

I do agree with a few of the others though. The Vales were a little confusing. The term typically refers to land.

Also, I don't know if this is just me, but when I zoom in to look at the details, the image pixilates and I have a hard time telling what some of the details are.

Far better than I can do, and great job for a first post.

[Hai-Etlik]

To curve text on a map you generally want to use a simple "text along path" type feature (Adobe has weird names for everything so it's probably called something different) Envelope deformations like this distort the actual letters which does not help readability. Adjusting the letter spacing is also a good technique and sometimes you might want to get down to nitty gritty adjustments to glyph positions. Inkscape can do this fairly easily so I assume there's a way in Illustrator. There is also some very tiny black text in places that is completely unreadable.

You have some odd rivers, including a lake that has rivers flowing out of it to opposite coastlines and another that seems to be flowing across the terrain gradient for an incredible distance. Rivers flow downhill, and they take the most direct coarse. Places where a river diverges into separate streams are short in distance and in duration, and they are rare except at the mouths of some rivers.

Also the scale seems off. You seem to be spanning between the polar ice caps, and are preserving compass bearings (Based on the presence of the compass). That implies you are using Normal Mercator as a projection, and that this map probably covers more than half of the planet's surface. That also means that if the planet is Earth sized (And there are significant problems with going very far from this), this continent is something like the size of Pangea. Judging by the details though, it doesn't look like it would even be the size of Australia, in fact it looks more like an island than a continent.

Assuming it works with what you are aiming for with this map, I'd drop one of the icecaps, and maybe the compass.

[Lukc]

(Adobe Illustrator stuff: it's called "Type on path" I think ... the only tricky thing is that it's hidden in a drop-down menu from the "Type" tool icon - or alternatively you can trust the Type tool itself, it usually suggests that you want to type on a path. Adjusting the start and end points of the typing and so on is a bit more of a hassle with the direct selection tool ("A"). Kerning, letter spacing, etc. is done in the Character panel. I forget the shortcut.)