Eilathen : Thankyou this one is hopefully done, but if you're asking if I'm working on more maps, I have a new one being checked for composition and concept. ♥
Diamond : Ah I'm glad if it works, I was wondering if it'd look too much like mold >.> thanks!
arsheesh : Hahaha thank you!
Bogie : Thank you! I tried to keep it autumny and warm
Hai-Etlik : I see what you mean with rivers/ bodies of water, the text are mostly adjusted to land (colors), so they do look pretty lost on dark blue-brown. Should be easy enough to fix. The curvey texts are made with text to path, I did all the naming with AI CS3/4.. so I don't get how it would look rotated.
About the borders.. I've tried several variations. Solid/ornate frame borders, no borders, etc, and all other didn't look as good as the initial design. There's a space on the left that is too wide to be borderless/ free from graphical elements; frame border would only aggravate the problem, while cropping it makes the plaque and sea look imbalanced. This border follows the rough sketch pretty closely, and as far as I can tell, seems to work best. Zooming in, I noticed a few jagged lines and smoothed some of them, I hope that would help the pasted-on look you mentioned.
Here's slightly larger, edited map: