The World Map
There are so many iconic pieces of graphic design around that I could write a 650-word long list of them. However, I decided to choose the world map. It interests me because it is such a household standard that you almost forget it exists. I love design that is truly embedded into real life, design that doesn’t only live in specialist magazines, design that is there and is brilliant without anyone having to say that it is.
Regardless of the fact that it situates itself in the bottom drawer of a lot of people’s minds, the world map remains an object with an incredible amount of power. It is relevant to each creature on our planet. People kill each other over its demarcations. It belongs to everyone and can be reproduced by everyone whichever way they want, without loosing its meaning or value. If I say world map we probably all have a slightly different version in our head, with our own country a bit bigger or brighter. That versatility and complexity is quite unique for an icon.
It means it crosses disciplines effortlessly. Many versions have been made not by graphic designers but by mathematicians, cartographers, illustrators, politicians and even satellites. I find design made by non-designers always fascinating.
The map of the world is meant to be objective but when you think about it, it is not at all. There is always a country in the middle. Have you ever seen that version of the world map with Japan in the centre, or the one where north and south are the other way around?
Apparently the very first ‘maps’ were lists. Travellers had lists of landmarks which they could recognise on their route. It’s amazing that someone, at some point, made the jump from a list to a map.
However, the world map isn’t just any kind of map. It entails one particularly complex issue, which is how you represent all sides of a 3d globe on a 2d surface, also known as a ‘projection’. The London A-Z may seem a masterpiece with all its backstreets and alleys, but compared to the world map, it is a child’s treasure map.
One of the first cartographers who had a big impact on map making is the Flemish Gerhard Kremer Mercator. Lots of companies in Belgium are named after him, like the school that taught me how to drive. In 1569 he developed a map with very precisely calculated lines and crossings, which correspond exactly to the readings of a compass. His projection is called a ‘conformal’ one; it means that it shows shapes pretty much as they appear on the globe, but is inaccurate when representing countries’ proportions and distances. The further away from Europe and the nearer to the Poles, the more distortion occurs. Greenland looks as big as South America whereas in reality it is a lot smaller. Despite this, the Mercator projection is still in use today, by Google Maps (maps.google.com) for example.
For me the most ingenious version of the world map has been conceived of by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Unfortunately his ‘Dymaxion’ or ‘Airocean World’ map never really made it into the mainstream. Buckminster Fuller was an amazing American designer/scientist, born in 1895. He first started working on his map of the world in 1927 and called it ‘The One-Town World’. His objective was to show our world as it truly is, as one island in one ocean, without splitting any of the continents. He later patented it under the name ‘Dymaxion’, which stands for ‘DYnamic - MAXimum – tensION’. It took him almost 25 years to fine-tune the mathematics that could render an accurate view of the earth as a flat world map. The result takes on the form of an icosahedron, a polyhedron with 20 triangular faces, whose shape most closely approximates a sphere. By doing so he made a map that is correct in representing both landmass and shape. It has no right way up either, there is no such thing in the universe. You can view it flat or assemble it so it becomes a globe. And as the triangles can be rearranged in different formations, there is no ‘centre’, so no ‘North/South divide’, not one country that is more important.
Of course lots of other world maps have been designed before and after Buckminster Fuller, such as the Pieter’s Projection, (which shows all the countries according to their correct size), the Robinson or Orthophanic Projection, the Goode Homolosine Projection (the one that looks like an orange peel) and the Winkel Tripel (used by the National Geographic) to name but a few. But for me the Dymaxion still stands as the most beautiful combination of mathematics, aesthetics and modernist vision in one piece of graphic design.
