Which map elements are essential

Watch the video on Mometrix Academy, 5 Elements of any map. Then, read the article by Caitlin Dempsey What’s in a Map? Exploring the Elements of Cartography available at GEOGRAPHYREALM, to start with.

Section 4.2 Map Design and Map Elements of the book Geographic Information Technologies by R. Adam Dastrup, MA, GISP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted, Copyright © 2020, provides a detailed account on the matter.

For a more technical point of view, you can refer to the article on map production on the qgis documentation repository.