Live data from Hacker News

A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

spoon-tamago.com

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that it tessellates so all you need to do is make the map a bit bigger and that distortion goes away (seen in [0]). 0. http://www.spoon-tamago.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/autha...

A map shouldn't need an infinite series of other maps to be useful.

But if you have an infinite series of maps (e.g. google maps) then using a projection that takes advantage of that is indeed useful.

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#52
The Good Design Award is pretty neat. Years ago when I lived in Japan I bought a mechanical pencil[0] that I absolutely loved. After more than a decade of use, I googled the pencil name and found that it had won a Good Design award. I thought it was great that a sub-$10 pencil could win something like that.

[0] http://ameblo.jp/staedler-rotring/entry-11510382804.html

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#53
post #43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tiles, so it can be used for web maps, you can just rotate it slightly and always have it north-pointing, so it can be used for mobile maps, and it shows the world in an equal view. And it doesn’t distort the shape of continents either, only the composition. This is amazing.

Can't you tile any projection? At least can't you nicely tile all those that have a rectangular boundary? Rotating north-wise for close-up views would work of course, but close-up you could just use a "proper" UTM projection instead. For the global view this map feels gimmicky/artsy and not useful for everyday usage. Disclaimer: I like this work very much and I am super happy a map won this award! I just feel that it…

True, but you want a seemless zoom from the world view onto a local image, without having too much distortion in populated zones.

The simplest solution is to just do what Google earth did: use a globe.

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#54

Can anyone working in cartography comment on this? What is the state of active research in cartography? Map making used to be one of the most prized technical skills and I was wondering where the field is moving. First thing that came to mind was new d3 transform...

From my perspective, new projections are very interesting but largely irrelevant until a specific use case is defined. Just minimizing a specific type of projection error isn't typically enough, since a large amount of map comprehension is guided by the users pre-existing conception of what a map of a specific area should look like. And there are a lot of projections/coordinate systems/datums to consider, here is a source to browse through:

http://spatialreference.org/

I'm usually working in an EPSG code, and of the 4,000+ EPSG codes I probably use 10 regularly and perhaps have used 100 in my lifetime (if anything, that's an overestimate). They are designed this way, most of them simply represent a small area of the earths surface well. Since I primarily work in the Northeast United States, I don't need to use a whole lot of them.

I'm playing loose with terms here, the EPSG codes are really 'spatial references' made up of various 'projections' and 'coordinate systems' and 'datums' and etc. I usually find it easier to just talk about spatial references because they are so commonly used as a shortcut approach as opposed to individually selecting the attributes that make up the spatial references.

Cartography includes an incredible wide body of work, defined largely by the data sets being used, the audience/purpose of the display, and the medium.

For example, if we narrow our focus to just models of the actual world this includes surveys, navigation programs, hiking maps, remote sensing rasters, etc. - all of which have very little overlap concerning data, audience, and medium.

I build geography products, but I'm not a researcher - hopefully someone with more research experience can chime in, but perhaps your questions is too broad given how deep various geography niches can run. I know I certainly haven't even started to answer your question.

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#57
post #45

It remind me of Buckminster Fuller map work in the '40 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarion_map

fixed link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

They were indeed -- http://www.authagraph.com/projects/description/【作品解説】記事01/?l... (click #3)

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#58

The Good Design Award is pretty neat. Years ago when I lived in Japan I bought a mechanical pencil[0] that I absolutely loved. After more than a decade of use, I googled the pencil name and found that it had won a Good Design award. I thought it was great that a sub-$10 pencil could win something like that. [0] http://ameblo.jp/staedler-rotring/entry-11510382804.html

What was so special about it?

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#59
post #40
post #36

Cutting the map in the Pacific just makes a lot more sense rather than cutting it in the Atlantic. Do we really need most of the space in the middle of the map to be water?

This is a fairly standard practice for maps that are targeted for users in Japan, Korea, and China (perhaps other counties as well). I'm not sure about the why. Maybe because it puts the target countries more towards the center of the map rather than the periphery?

A relatively small circle in SouthEast Asia, with center in North Vietnam will include the majority of the world's population: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/07...

Re: A Map of the World Won Japan’s Prestigious Design Award

#60

Can anyone working in cartography comment on this? What is the state of active research in cartography? Map making used to be one of the most prized technical skills and I was wondering where the field is moving. First thing that came to mind was new d3 transform...

There is some research on getting cartography from static 2d (print) to interactive 2d (web/devices), like always having a locally optimized projection at any given time.

http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/ScaleAdaptiveWebMapProjec...

Post reply on HN