Messin Around with Maps: My Rapid Prototyping Process

I was browsing Pinterest for map inspiration (Pinspiration?) and got the idea to do a worldwide map layout showing the four hemispheres.

I hopped into Mike Bostock’s bl.ocks and found an example of the d3.orthographic projection.

I forked the gist and started tweaking the translation settings to get snapshots of the four hemispheres. Using this Projection Explorer was a big help there.

While I was tweaking the code in Atom, I used atom-live-server to watch the changes render live in Firefox. When I was satisfied with the settings, I took a screenshot.

I took those screenshots into Affinity Designer and nested them into some circles. Then I moved the circles around to create a really quick layout to see what it would look like.

And that’s how I explore a map idea on my lunch break.