Arrangement
Invisible grid
Drawing neatlines around your content will add visual clutter to your layout and does little to help you decide how to place and arrange your content.
Before you begin to place content on your layout, use guide lines or grid lines to create an invisible grid. Use the grid to size and arrange your content. If you do this well, you will not need to incarcerate your content with neatline strokes because the negative space of the layout will separate and hold the elements while helping elements align in vertical and horizontal dimensions. The grid should also enhance the visual balance of your layout.
Window on a world
Rectangular shapes provide a window metaphor for maps, though this may make the region appear “outside” and reinforce the separation of reader and subject.
If your frame will crop geography, then decide on a shape to frame your map that connects to your theme. Non-rectangular shapes will lend your map novelty, but also some suspicion of gimmick. Circular frames are often used for nautical themes because they resemble portholes. Geographic frames (a study region, political boundary, etc) show the shape of mapped interest but at the cost of insularity (or the idea that the world ends at the edge of your study region).
Power position
With paper layouts, a map reader will often scan the layout from left-to-right and from top-down.
Place things that you want your audience to see relatively soon after they start looking at your map in the top left corner of the layout. Place things of lesser importance that the audience does not need to see immediately in the lower right of the map.
Visual center
The visual center of a map lies just above dead center (or the point where two diagonals drawn from the corners would cross).
Place important locations of your mapped geography in the visual center of your map.
Leaky container
By delineating a crisp edge, the map’s border frame helps connote that you have cut or cropped a portion of space from a larger context, but it does little to suggest how your region of focus connects to the space outside or adjacent to your region.
Show a dynamic feature of your region (like a river, an ocean current, a major roadway) breaking through your map frame. This will draw the readers attention to the feature and thus provides a means to convey the intellectual hierarchy without relying solely on visual contrast. It also conveys the dynamic character of the feature and something that connects your region to the outside. Be conservative when applying this pattern. If you break the frame in all directions, you diminish the unexpected quality of the pattern and its narrative force.