It’s amazing how an almost 20 year old map projection just recently came into fame outside of Japan. Initially already designed in 1999(!) it only recently resurfaced across the world after receiving the Good Design Grand Award in Japan 🇯🇵.
Now there’s a few big websites writing about how great it is, calling it “close to perfect”, “most accurate”, … and so on. I agree that it’s a pretty cool way of looking at the map but discrediting the currently used Mercator projection to being “completely wrong”, … is just wrong itself.
As it’s way simpler to look at a 2D map (imagine carrying around a globe all the time 🌍), a lot of people created map projections — from 3D to 2D. Unfortunately every projection type will always have some kind of distortion (shapes/angles or sizes/distances or are just approximations).
Now remember that the Mercator projection was created for a completely different time — navigating the seas and exploring the world. Of course this might not be for what we use map nowadays, so the debate (or arguments) should not be, how “completely wrong” this projection is, but if there is another projection that is more useful for today’s use-cases.
Don’t get me wrong: AuthaGraph is a great project and has potential to be a new way of looking at the earth — but it’s still just an approximation. So it does not make another projection wrong but just serves a different use-case 🗾.
Why I even care about this? I’ve graduated high school specialising in map projections, I love sharing my opinion and to point out too sensational news stories 😉.
