I posted this as a comment to a thread that's a few hours old, but ~~Reddit gives out karma for text posts now~~ I thought it would be cool to bring it to a larger audience by making it its own post.

Here's how I feel about maps and how they are drawn, plus there are handy tips.

##General Systems

- **Always have Google Earth open in the background.** I draw maps as an extension of my interest in real-life geography. Without this interest, everything would probably just seem like a chore. Pan and zoom around for stuff that can serve as an analogue for what you're drawing: no need to copy anything directly, but always have good reference material at your fingertips.

- **Look for trends, deconstruct the concepts.** This is the most important one! Most beginner mistakes come from failing to analyze real-life maps properly. When you look at how something is shaped, don't just think "that's a squiggle, so I'll draw a squiggle too"... look at the details of *how* it squiggles, and for extra credit, look at *why* it squiggles like that. The Andes are very long... parts of Scotland look kind of like they've been shattered... Australia only has, like, one river. How come, eh? You're incredibly lucky, because you're in the first generation of human beings to have really quick and easy access to satellite imagery of anywhere in the world. Don't waste this opportunity!

- **Introduce variety.** The number of geographic concepts in the real world is huge: a world influenced by only a few processes will look like a world influenced by only a few cultures (i.e. flat and boring). Really look around for new things to introduce.

- **Don't get tricked by pointless/inapplicable counter-examples.** OK, I see a lot of this: people find Wikipedia articles about incredibly rare geographic features, and they link them here on this subreddit so that people can feel good about having accidentally drawn these features on their maps. Yes, rivers technically *can* run from coast to coast! You see, there's this little marsh in the mountains of Wyoming somewhere that *technically* connects the Atlantic and Pacific... so use your brain and imagine why Cheyenne has, inexplicably, failed to become a centre of maritime commerce.

- **It's an iterative process.** Draw a small, rough draft... I recommend working at a really small, one-pixel-at-a-time resolution at first. (No program will make this easy, but you can find a good painting program that lets you use semi-advanced selection tools, like GIMP instead of MS Paint.) Think about the rough topography, think about the rough coastlines... because both of these things are going to inform each other. Once you have both, you can combine them and try to work on more detailed coastlines... so you can then go back and work on more detailed topography... and so on.

##Specific Processes

- No need to create a comprehensive tectonic system, but remember: geography doesn't come in blobs, it comes in lines and intersections of lines. That's why fractal-based map generators are usually quite displeasing.

- Let's look at the legendary "splitting rivers" (or, even better, rivers that run from coast to coast). This all ranges from physically unlikely to physically impossible: rivers flow downhill, draining rainfall into the ocean, they erode valleys for themselves as they travel, and so on. But if you don't think about the concept of what a "river" is or what it does, you just think "rivers are squiggly lines on a map"... and so, you end up just drawing some meaningless squiggly lines.

- Fucking rivers, man... they're the most obvious indicator of what kind of background has gone into a map, so let's just say a lot of ink has already been spilled on this subject. Yes, large rivers will get dirty as they flow, and when they hit a large body of water they'll start building up new land and therefore also branching out because all of the filth and the seawater will interact in interesting ways. This is a delta, go look for real-life ones to see how they work (they are usually low-lying and soggy, believe it or not). Deltas don't randomly happen for no reason (...actually, nothing randomly happens for no reason).

- Another great one to watch out for: they're called "mountain ranges", not "mountain clumps". Mountains usually come in long, elegant strings: a severely mountainous area will have a lot of parallel strings in it, but this entire form will have a certain kind of nice order to it. Most world maps I see here could really benefit from more elegant mountains. Going further:

- Fjords, or as I like to call them, "inlets": these form through glacial action, which is why they're associated with the polar latitudes. Conversely, Africa's coast is nice and smooth all the way around. Drawing these is a pain in the ass, but people love Northern Europe for some reason, so it seems like they're almost obligatory now. Feel free to not go along with the crowd on this one. (The trick to drawing fjords: don't "add" little parallel peninsulas to your map... instead, subtract narrow inlets of water from a coastline you've already drawn. It's not quite that simple, but this will give you a good start.)

- Non-mountainous coastlines have their own irregularities: check out the barrier islands and large sounds of the south/eastern United States. This land is swampier and has less fortitude, so it gets shaped in more interesting and transient ways. (And yet, none of this stops people from building retirement homes on it.)

- Remember there's nothing magical about island chains: they are just features of land that are mostly submerged. Putting a mountain range underwater will get you a nice, long archipelago... there are a few other interesting ways that islands can form, too, which makes this kind of thing pretty fun to draw.

- You can't fix a bad set of blobby-looking continents by giving them really jaggedy and overworked coastlines: complexity at all levels of scale is important!

- Cut down on your large islands: a whole bunch of Greenlands looks unrealistic, because nothing like that exists in the real world. (Landmasses are constantly increasing and decreasing in size, so having all your continents be the same size is just generally unlikely.) This is some of the fastest large-scale advice I can give. Look at our real continents: there's not very many, and they seem to follow large-scale curves and patterns (which is part of what led to the development of plate tectonic theory).

- World-scale mapping is pretty much the hardest thing to do... I'm not even good at it. If you want to just start out with a regional map, go for it! It'll turn out better and be easier to fix.

##Programs and Practical Advice

- **Don't add photo-realistic rendering effects to a map until you've actually spent a lot of time making the geography satisfying.** Photo-realistic effects (and there are a LOT of tutorials for these!) can make any map look passable to the uninitiated, so if you're a time-stressed DM or something then go for it: but, if you want to put thought into your map, save the embellishments for last.

- Again, I recommend working at a small pixel-art scale at first: this is because all the most impressive world maps I've seen have been done as pixel art, one-at-a-time. The small resolution prevents you from focusing on minor details and thus missing the big picture, which is otherwise INCREDIBLY easy to do. (I once saw some 20000x10000 pixel map that had an excruciatingly detailed coastline, but the shape of all the continents was just a set of completely uninspired blobs... this is a huge and painful mistake.)

- No program can make your map good if you