Field note
The explorer’s chart
Coasts and regions. A picture of the territory, and where you stand in it.
The explorer style is the one the sample chart uses for Mara Ellison. It borrows the manners of a nineteenth-century atlas plate: a compass rose, a ruled border, place-names that are actually your interests, water and land as regions of attention. It is a picture of territory, not of destiny.
Use it when the romance of a map is part of why you want the object on a wall. The romance has a limit. We do not draw stars, signs, or a sky that claims to know you. The compass is an instrument. It points at what you said.
Labels sit in small type in the print layout and in larger type on the phone sheet. If a name matters, it should be readable from the sofa in the PNG. That is the test.