Geographic framework
Think of the word map as a verb, or an instrument that maps from the world of experiences and/or observations to a world of graphics and symbols. How will you represent, preserve, and distort the spatial and temporal dimensions of this mapping?
Scales of thought
Geographic thinking often requires people to think across scales.
Identify the scales of thought that your map should support. Rather than trying to make one map that helps people think at all of these scales, design separate maps for each scale of thought.
For example, when planning a trip, a person will need to compare attributes of different regions to figure out where to go. When they make the trip, however, they will need finer details, such as street names, to figure out how to get there.
Where in the world?
Academic geographers like to poo poo on the idea that geography concerns trivia about the world, but unfortunately, many people suffer from geographic illiteracy. They do not do well when asked to situate a country, mountain range, or river on the globe.
Your audience should gain a sense of geographic context and understand what part of the world the map shows them. Show how your region of interest connects to a smaller scale map, or “locator” map.
Purposeful projections
Geographic projections can not simultaneously preserve shape, size, distance and direction across small scale maps.
Choose a projection that preserves the spatial properties that will facilitate the kinds of reasoning that you want your map to facilitate. For example, NG’s 1980 atlas plate of Southeast Asia uses an oblique Mercator projection. This preserves the relative shape of countries along a diagonal axis that corresponds to the southeasterly trend of land masses in this region.
Reference scale
Is it important for your audience to understand your map’s scale? Do they need to reason about distances? If so, did you include a scale bar or labeled distances directly onto connecting features like roads or provided some other means for directly representing the map’s scale? When choosing increments, did you use round numbers with intervals that reflect how people think about distances?