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

The only map I can think of from the sphere to the plane (and periodically tiles) uses genus 0 Riemann surfaces and quadratic differentials. And I know he didn't do that.

Nonetheless, there's a fascinating work by Anton Zorich called "Flat Surfaces" (it's a great discussion with lots of pictures)) https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0609392 The geodesics on a flat plane is the straight line -- while the geodesics on a sphere are the great arcs. So there has to be a fair amount of distortion.

I could imagine just drawing a map of the world on the surface of a cube instead of a sphere. That might come out pretty bad.

The point is just that this is a map which faithfully represents relative areas? We've known how to do that for hundreds of years; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection#Equal-area.

It's of note that there are some ways in which a flat map can never accurately represent a spherical geometry; for example, not even any small patch of a globe can be represented on a flat map with all distances kept faithful.

ETA: I shouldn't be so quickly dismissive, perhaps; it's also noted that this "AuthaGraph" map has certain tiling properties I'll have to think about further.

Why not?

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.

The Good Design Award is not prestigious anymore, nowadays they routinely allow about any company to feature a good design logo on all kind of ridiculous items like PET bottles and so on.