"Electoral Maps Made Proportional" at The Map Room.
Maps always distort--that's their job, given things like the distortions made intranslating 3D space to 2D display (see this page on the Mercator vs. Peters Projection, for example), let alone all that abstraction maps must do to do their work. We're used to seeing U.S. electoral college maps presented as a simple overlay on the same maps of the US that we saw in our textbooks in school (and continue to see on weather forecasts, atlases, etc.). But what if we tried to make the areas of the map represent each state's weight in the electoral college. (As information design legend Harry Beck showed with his design of The London Underground tube map, sometimes different types of distortions are more productive than our usual methods.)
Posted by johndan at September 26, 2004 10:19 PM