Understanding maps

I’ve always enjoyed maps, and they still kind of blow my mind when I really think about it. Especially with hiking and international travel, the sense of space in a place is always something I have a hard time intuiting, and maps are a starting point to understanding, as well as geopolitics :)

In terms of understanding how map projections work, I really enjoyed this video that was linked from this Slow Boring post:

Any chance I can persuade you to write a column titled “The Mercator Projection is Bad?”

Johnny Harris did a great video on this for Vox, and that’s really all I have to say about it.

I’m sure he’s just cutting it open for effect, but it’s a great visual that explains the problem, and the visualizations of how different map projections happen are really well done.

The true size

This is a great chance to also link to one of my favorite tools: The True Size Of. It allows you take a specific country or state, and create a shadow image that you can move around and compare to the size of other places. This is shown using the projection, so you can get a sense for the size of things.

Here is an example of Texas compared to Alaska, but using the same projection space:

It’s a great way to better understand how big Africa is, and get a real sense of the relative size of places.



Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!