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Sorry but this is going to be rather critical.
Your in progress thread for this map indicates that you are using a base map and recolouring the relief presentation of the existing map. Even if the original is public domain or provided under a license that doesn't require credit, not giving credit is plagiarism as it gives the impression you did the work of building that relief layer yourself (It's a lie of omission to the people seeing it). Plagiarism isn't (generally) illegal like copyright infringement is but it's widely considered unethical. You should strongly consider including credit for the original map you modified. It doesn't have to be in the image but the first post of the thread would be a good idea along with a caption, footnote, or something like that any time you present it. Raw map geometry is a grey area, but presentation is absolutely a matter for copyright and plagiarism.
No cartographer would use this projection (it looks like maybe a Winkel Tripel?) for a map with this extent. It looks clearly 'skewed' and has steadily increasing scale distortion from one side to the other. Most maps of the US and North America as a whole are done in conic or azimuthal projections centred in the US.
The OCR font is also rather out of place. It's intended for letting primitive computer vision systems read text while still being somewhat readable by humans. It's used for standardized forms like cheques that need to be processed via optical recognition. Such fonts have been replaced by much more natural looking ones as computer vision algorithms have improved. There's no way a primitive OCR system would need to read a reference map like this, and if it did you would have to significantly improve the contrast. All it really accomplishes is to hurt the human readability. The highly condensed font used for the smaller city labels is also a bad choice. As text gets smaller you generally want to make it wider to improve readability. That font seems like it was meant for large titles, not for very small labels.
The contrast in general is also not very good. It looks nice this way, but it makes the map harder to read. You need to decide what's important: what information is needed for the purpose the map is fulfilling. Then you need to make sure that information is absolutely as clear as possible. In this case it seems like the political, population, and contamination information is the point and the physical base map is just to provide a point of reference. If that's the case, then you should tone it down. Reduce the contrast within the base layer, and move it away from the middle range of luminosity so that the important features can contrast with it better and stand out. It's also very hard to distinguish the biohazard and radiation symbols; adding a colour difference between them would help.
Your labelling is also a bit haphazard. Try to stay consistent about how you label any particular kind of feature. If political area features should always be labelled the same way. Always a horizontal label near the centre or always a gentle curve stretched over the extent of the area. Try to keep exceptions to a minimum, and keep each kind of exception consistent: if you have curved area labels and want to label a very small area, then always label such areas the same alternate way, say by using a horizontal label nearby as if they were point features. Straight line diagonal labels are also a bad idea, they just look ugly on most maps. Having a label partly hidden under a partially transparent neatline/border is particularly bad for readability.
Labeling is one of the hardest parts of cartography. "Positioning Names on Maps" by Eduard Imhof is an excellent resource.
