Reintroduction, and a world too

[Viking]

Welcome back! Also... fantastic stuff! I love this kind of detail in these kind of maps. I really dig the look of your trade routes too.

[Hai-Etlik]

Well, it's interesting to look at, in an extremely saturated way. It seems like you've got more contrast dedicated to decorative textures than to meaningful parts of the map though which makes it hard to read. Besides being hard to read, the labels could also be placed better. Smaller text, higher contrast, wider spacing, and try to be consistent about size, being curved or not, and most other properties across feature classes (of one sea has a cuved label, all seas should have curved labels) Area features usually look best when they have a slightly curved label stretched to span the extent of the feature. http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...ps=#post133147 is an excellent resource for labelling.

The "trade routes" are a bit odd too. Now maybe your world has highly rigid long distance oceanic ferry routes important enough to go on a reference map like this. That seems unlikely though. Nearby coastal communities can be reached from each other, with longer trips possible if both ports are large enough, or if you have your own ship, or are willing to pay someone with their own ship enough, and the details of where you can get, and how quickly, cheaply, and safely you can get there, will all vary with the weather, the season, politics, etc. That the locations are on the coast really ought to be enough. Those lines convey far more rigidity that you probably intend while trying to convey something that out to be obvious, and produce a lot of clutter in the process. You might want to cut it back to just roads.