Map Projection

This is the end result of my time as a graphic design student at Kingston. The Degree show ended today, and so I wanted show my featured project, Map Projections.

A map projection is a way of displaying the world on a flat surface for easy viewing, so any map of the world that you've seen has used one projection or another. To flatten the world, there has to be some distortion, and with an unlimited amount of possible projections the distortion can vary greatly. On most world maps, it isn't easily recognisable. The Mercator projection, for example, is most commonly used in UK schools, but on this map the whole northern hemisphere has been enlarged, exaggerating the importance of the countries that reside there (including of course Mercator's birthplace of Belgium).

I wanted to create a way of seeing how distorted some of these maps are. What is so familiar that any change in shape could be easily recognised? The Alphabet, of course. I began mapping each letter of the alphabet to a different projection, eventually choosing the most interesting to include in my own atlas of distorted worlds.