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

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

#61

Post by johnnyhillbilly »

logicallee wrote: post #28
ludwigschubert wrote: post #11

While interesting, I'm not sure the actual map as pictured is a "good design": One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps. Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users. The proposed design thus…

>One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps. Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users. Totally agreed!!! To say nothing about totally irrelevant places like Africa. I've written up some of…

Normally, I don't use maps to compare the size of continents. That's what tables and lists are for. I use them to see where geographical areas are relative to one another. Others have other needs, depending on what they do with their lives.

I think you bring a nasty tone to the conversation, and you bring straw men and appeals to emotion with a rehearsed disregard for the practical issues others work with.

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

#62

Post by jbtow »

themodelplumber wrote: post #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

Wow I received this exact pencil two years ago for Christmas and I've used it nearly every day since it was gifted to me. In fact I just put it down to type this. I am not surprised at all that it has won a design award. I was the type of person to misplace pencils like socks out of the laundry, but I treat this pencil as a companion.

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

#63

Post by blahedo »

al452 wrote: post #35
GavinMcG wrote: post #16

> "AuthaGraph... faithfully represents all oceans and continents" What does this mean? Literally, that is impossible, so what's it actually preserving and distorting? It looks like angle is distorted. Is that it?

For one thing there is massive distortion of relative distances in southern parts... New Zealand or Australia to Antarctica is something like 4 hours flight, not halfway across the planet.

You can see at the bottom of the second poster that the same projection admits different framings of the tesselation plane to reflect different purposes. The one in the triangle seems ideal to reflect a focus on Antarctica and indeed conveys the fact you mention.

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

#64

Post by gcb0 »

themodelplumber wrote: post #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

that's the difference between proper design and art: accessibility.

things like sculpted juicers with limited production runs for artificially inflated price did much to murky that very simple distinction.

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

#65

Post by gcb0 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #50
danielmorozoff wrote: post #5

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...

I don't work as a cartographer but I studied geography for a Bachelor's and Master's. That being said, my knowledge has atrophied a lot. I was exposed to hundreds of map projections in school, so I'm still kind of trying to figure out what the novelty is here. It just looks like a Japan-centrerd equal-area projection. The tetrahedron is kind of neat. Projections are generally planar, cylindrical, or conical. By using…

you nailed it. Japan has a huge love for Japan centered maps. if you look at any early nes or Sega games, all the maps are your familiar Cartesian but with Japan in the center, making the jump from ny to London look much longer than la to Tokyo.

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

#66

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

sarcher wrote: post #54
danielmorozoff wrote: post #5

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 s…

I think Google has done a lot to get us away from different projections with EPSG 3857 and 4326. It's both a blessing (because you can expect most geographic data to be available in that format) and a curse (because 3857 is kind of a shitty projection and the standardization sort of disincentivizes people to learn about the intricacies of coordinate representation).

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

#67

Post by jessaustin »

moogly wrote: post #55
IgorPartola wrote: post #26

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/977/

Hopefully one day the creator of xkcd will make a comic strip about how xkcd references are, in fact, not obligatory.

If he does, it will only remain amusing for a couple of days...

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

#68

Post by sarcher »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #66
sarcher wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think Google has done a lot to get us away from different projections with EPSG 3857 and 4326. It's both a blessing (because you can expect most geographic data to be available in that format) and a curse (because 3857 is kind of a shitty projection and the standardization sort of disincentivizes people to learn about the intricacies of coordinate representation).

Totally agree about prevalence of 4326/3857 as a net positive. Given I still find projection/coordinate representation a little tricky, I think the chances that widespread education on the subject would ever exist to be pretty slim. Might as well just have a good default.

Displaying state/country level data using EPSG:4326 isn't great, thankfully it doesn't happen often.

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

#69

Post by logicallee »

johnnyhillbilly wrote: post #61
logicallee wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the strengths and success criteria of the Mercator projection is that it allows us to largely ignore the vastness of the Pacific Ocean on our maps. Notice how much of this map is taken up by it. While interesting from a planetary perspective, it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users. Totally agreed!!! To say nothing about totally irrelevant places like Africa. I've written up some of…

Normally, I don't use maps to compare the size of continents. That's what tables and lists are for. I use them to see where geographical areas are relative to one another. Others have other needs, depending on what they do with their lives. I think you bring a nasty tone to the conversation, and you bring straw men and appeals to emotion with a rehearsed disregard for the practical issues others work with.

The comment I quoted was incredibly dismissive with "it simply isn't that important to everyday life of most map users".

In my personal opinion - and I'm not that big of a map expert - the reason Mercator projection is popular is because it makes the United States as well as Europe bigger and more prominent, and shrinks areas its users care less about. It has nothing to do in my opinion with showing where geographic areas are relative to one another, as you state. If that were the actual issue, don't you think distortion of the oceans would be a big issue? After all, that determines where these locations are relative to one another. If you look at any more modern projection (including a view like this - https://i.redd.it/iqoed05vvfux.png ) you will see that the aspect you say the projection is good for (showing where areas are relative to each other) is better-served by those more modern projections. So it can't be the reason you state.

In fact what I parodied isn't a straw man argument at all: it is the fundamental reason (in my opinion) that the Mercator projection was, and is, popular.

You don't know this, but the reason for the "nasty" tone is because until I edited it to be very, very clear in its current form, my draft read to me like I was actually making the argument! (Because people do think that way.) I had to make it 'nasty' because edited even very slightly, it no longer sounds like a parody or satire, it sounds completely earnest. Hope you can understand my perspective on this and why I chose to share it the way I did. With a little imagination, you could see that if I edited it only slightly, it would be taken to be a genuine defense of the Mercator projection for the actual reasons I stated. I wanted to avoid that.

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

#70

Post by wott »

Okaaay... I find this map is a terrible design in several obvious ways (obvious as hurting my eyes in a matter of seconds).

* Blue colour for lands. No comment...

* Most space, and especially the main one: center, is occupied by boring useless oceans.

* Then the remaining of the central space is occupied by the largest countries: very little information there.

* The most interesting parts, i.e. where there are plenty of small countries with fancy borders (hence mostly Europe and Africa, followed by Near-East and South America) are rejected to the side.

* To add insult to injury, those parts are the most slanted and twisted.

* Finally, there are no axes clearly remarkable, no North, no South clearly identifiable, which should be the basis of describing a planetary globe. The deformations and transformations discard or at least hide every easy bit of information, no orientation is immediately possible.

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