Hugh, it honestly sounds like you have a perfect life!

Yeah bingo, there’s something about the distortions such that the heavily adjusted shapes are obviously a-geographic to the eye, and consequently they just sing out at you. That makes countrys whose population:size ratio is off-average jump right out visually.

Also: what’s up with Brazil, doesn’t it know this is a cartogram?

While arguing about this with my girlfriend, I made the point that if what you were interested in was just popluation, that effect was a *bad* thing, because it distorted the key variable, and the World Mapper version more directly communicated that info. But she made the point that it was a good thing in that it effectively communicated 2 variables at once and intuitively: population /and/ density.

Yes I sat around on a thursday night and argued about cartograms with my girlfriend. What’s wrong with that?

Thanks for the link to the new worldmapper maps, I was trying to find that and failed. I did however track down the transparency-based election cartogram. I liked it, she didn’t, go figure. I do think that the point raised in the comment thread that colour value perception is mediated by adjacent colours is significant in that context.

On that last note, the Worldmapper team has some interesting new maps in which they included a grid, so you can clearly see the distortions. That would seem to allow you to tell the high density areas from low density areas without having to be familiar with the undistorted geography.

My attempt ended up being this (with a few variations here). Rather than varying size like a cartogram, it uses transparency to “equalize” the map units. Reviews were mixed last year; some people seemed to think it was great but others were not convinced. I ended up co-authoring a paper to propose the technique (which we called “value-by-alpha”)… one of these days I mean to write a blog post about that.

Oh, and thanks for the tip in the Mapping Worlds link!

Myself and my partner were just flipping back and forth between the Gastner/Newman/Shalizi version of the population map (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cartograms/) which I assume you hate, and the Mapping Worlds one you present here, and we decided that the Mapping Worlds version does a job of cleanly conveying the population variable, but the bloaty Gastner version is capable of conveying both population and also density.

So there’s that.

By the way, your link to the Mapping Worlds version is dead.

Did you ever do that nice version of the Election cartogram you promised? I suppose I could get off my ass and search.

I like to think that some of us younger cartographers recognize that we aren’t the arbiters of “good” maps, but that we can be valuable, and that we earn our worth not by sitting around cursing the amateur mapmaker but by getting on board and contributing. Inevitably, sometimes it is going to come down to expressing some elitist opinion, as here. I’ve deliberately taken an insulting (though I hope light) tone, but really the point is to remind that while there’s nothing wrong with liking the popular map (even if I don’t), there may be something better out there.

I hope I’ve now accomplished insulting both amateur and professional cartographers!

This isn’t meant to be a diss: your field likely has very good reasons to drill certain ideas of what counts as good into your brains.