How to Make a Professional Mineral Exploration Map
A professional exploration map needs five things: a basemap that suits the audience, a legible title block with project name, company and date, a scale bar and north arrow, a legend that names every layer, and an export sized for where the map will actually be seen. Choose the basemap by output — light for reports, satellite for investor decks, topographic for access and infrastructure. Export PDF for anything printed or filed, PNG for slides and email.
What separates a figure from an illustration
A map without a scale bar and a north arrow is an illustration. Reviewers of technical reports expect both on every figure, and investors read their presence as competence without consciously noticing them. The same is true of a legend that names every layer and a title block that says what the project is and when the map was made. None of this is difficult — it is just easy to forget under deadline, and its absence is the first thing an experienced reader notices.
Choose the basemap by where the map is going
The basemap is the single biggest decision, and it should be made by output rather than by taste.
| Basemap | Use it for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Technical reports, permitting, regulatory filings | Neutral grey canvas keeps claim boundaries, collars and labels legible, and survives photocopying and greyscale printing |
| Satellite | Investor presentations, location maps | Answers 'how remote is this?' and 'is there access?' before anyone asks. Pair with light-coloured layer strokes |
| Topographic | Access, infrastructure, drill planning | Contours and elevation shading carry the story when it is physical — road access, pad locations, powerline routes |
| Dark | Website heroes, social posts, on-screen dashboards | High contrast makes coloured layers glow on screen. Do not print it |
Add context, then get out of the way
Two overlays sharpen almost any exploration map: the Context overlay (roads, water bodies and towns) and Reference Labels (place names that orient a reader instantly). Drop the context opacity to roughly 40–60% so your own data stays dominant. The failure mode here is enthusiasm — a map carrying every available layer at full strength communicates less than one carrying three.
Scale bar and north arrow
Both live in the Design section and both are toggles. The scale bar calculates real ground distance for the current view and picks a clean round number that updates as you zoom, so there is nothing to hand-edit and nothing to get wrong when you change the framing.
- Scale bar: bottom-left or bottom-right, away from the legend
- North arrow: a top corner, opposite the title block
- Neither should overlap data, labels, or an inset map
- Elements assigned to the same corner stack automatically with correct spacing
Distance rings, when proximity is the argument
A distance ring turns 'remote project' into a number, and it earns its place whenever proximity is part of the story — distance to the nearest town, port, rail line, mill or power line, or a 'within trucking distance' argument for a development-stage project.
Centre the ring on the infrastructure rather than on your project. The label then reads as the distance to it, which is the direction the argument runs. Enable the curved arc label and keep the text short — distance plus landmark, e.g. "50 km from Port of Prince Rupert".
The title block
Project name, company name, and the map date. The date matters more than people expect: a claim map without one is undateable evidence, and tenure status changes. Click the title on the map to edit it, set the date in Design → Text & Metadata, and upload your logo at the bottom of the Layers section.
Export: match the output before you frame
Set the export ratio first. The on-screen guides then show exactly what the exported file will contain, so you frame once rather than exporting, checking, and re-framing.
| Going to | Format | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Slide deck, website, email | PNG | Landscape 16:9 |
| Technical report figure, permitting document | Letter or A4 portrait | |
| News release attachment | PDF or PNG | Landscape 16:9 for the wire, portrait if it is also a report figure |
| Print at size | PDF at 3× pixel ratio | Match the page |
Check it at the size it will be seen
The most common export mistake is judging a map at full screen when it will be viewed as a slide thumbnail, in an email on a phone, or as a half-page figure. Shrink the browser window, or open the exported file at its real display size, and confirm the labels and the scale bar are still readable. If they are not, the fix is fewer labels rather than smaller ones.