This Isn't England

About two years ago I was looking at a map of the world and noticed that Britain seemed disproportionately large.

My companion remarked that this was because in days of yore whoever was drawing the map always made their country look bigger and more important. This nugget of information sticks in the brain.

So for the last two years I've been taking pictures of Britain on world maps. Not accurate maps, but drawings or illustrations of maps. The differences are amazing. You might assume that all maps were accurate, or at least accurate-ish. But no, designers play fast and loose with the truth making the host country bigger, more important or more central.

Look at Britain in these photos. Look at the size of it compared to Europe. It's the same, but different.

Americans will be used to seeing this map of the world.

Whereas Europeans will be used to seeing this map of the world.

In this instance one isn't more accurate than the other, but the perception is very different and the power designers wield in shaping that perception is huge.

New Zealanders can often play Spot Our Country. Next time you see a map of the world on the BBC News or in the paper, look for New Zealand. Odds are it will have been left out in the name of aesthetics. If it's not left out then it's cropped to within an inch of it's life.

Most New Zealanders would probably prefer their maps to look like this.

The answer to most of these problems is to look at the world via Buckminster Fuller's amazing Dymaxion Map.

OK, OK, we're drifting off the point a little bit. Map projection is a huge topic and this Wikipedia page is a good place to start. There's also a good article called The Map Gap on BBC News.

Back to where we started. Over the last few months I took lots of photos of maps, you can see them on Flickr.

Today I traced over England, Scotland and Wales. Please note these tracings were done quickly and aren't massively detailed. The results are quite odd.

They all look pretty different don't they? You know it's Great Britain, but some of them are wild approximations.

Next I dropped them all on top of each other (here I left off Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because I wanted to compare just one shape).

That's a bit higgledy piggledy so I filled them all in.

Viola! The mean shape of England , Scotland and Wales by 14 graphic designers. Not very accurate, is it?

This isn't a cartography blog and I know some of these maps are over stylised for a reason but I want to make a wider point about graphic designers and the assumptions we make and how easily they are accepted. If you look at all the maps on Flickr they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together it looks like madness. Like people having been taking liberties with the truth.

Think of other times you do this.

Hierarchies are a good example. The point of bold and italic and underline is to make one piece of text more important than the other. But how many times do you see a poster where the text is bold, italic and underlined? I bet I could get a load of notices like that and achieve the same effect as the 14 shapes above. Everything would be bold.

Premiumisation - there's a word that really fucks me off. I once heard the MD of a famous packing company droning on about how his firm's USP was that they could design premiumisation into any old piece of packaging. In case you're wondering, that means lots of over elaborate folds, some foil blocking and a healthy does of script and moody photography. Problem is, take a look at the chocolate cakes in Tescos, I bet you'll find 10 'premiumised' brands, 4 value brands and nothing inbetween.

What I'm saying is that graphic designers have a certain amount of power, people tend to trust what they see without much questioning. We should use that power carefully.

Comments

[Wavish]

Brilliant stuff - especially the big squiggle. And know I have a new bit of jargon to ease into my vocab. Cheers!

[Paul H. Colman]

This is brilliant. A bit like when you wrote that thing about kerning - that was a happier time.

[caroline]

I remember a magazine issuing a 'real' map of the world, I think it was The New Internationalist....it was very interesting, changed the concept I had of world geography.

[Kev Mears]

As you say the subject of map projections is a large and interesting one, but I really enjoyed the hands on you did tracing the shapes.

I enjoyed The Mark Monmonier book - 'How to lie with maps', which details just how many assumptions are made in cartography.

and Secret Bases is always fun

[Matt]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3247/2649374650_e8da5a2dbc_o.jpg

i couldn't help it

[andrew]

Without coming across as a know-it-all (which I am not) I thought the reason the UK comes over as bigger is that the world is round and whatever point you look at directly is bigger than the rest because "the rest" is curving away with the surface of the globe.

So if a French map has France in the centre of the map (which is reasonable) then the UK will appear slightly smaller, and the middle east yet smaller, and so on.

This matters because it is often used in a politically correct context as "proof" that the UK has a superiority complex whereas in fact it is just proof that the map was designed for a UK market.

I like the ironic title of your post as nowhere in any of the maps does the word "England" appear.

[lauren]

ha! nice one matt.
brilliant post ben. i think it will be interesting to see how maps change over the next decade, given the reach of google maps/google earth. will we care more or less about the shape of a country, or will it just be reduced to a link?

[Jim]

Here's another one for you - Ptolemy's Anglia, Hibernia and Scotia. I think the shape of the coastline on older maps (pre 18th century) is limited by the inability to accurately determine longitude.

There are loads of medieval charts in the Maritime Museum collections, if you're interested.

[davidthedesigner]

Another great post, Ben.

At the risk of seeming immodest, it reminded me of my post from a while back about the revised map of Belgium and Europe: http://www.davidthedesigner.com/davidthedesigner/2007/10/a-belgocentric-.html

And there's lots of other great and strange maps at the appropriately titled http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

[Emily Wilkinson]

Have you seen Peters Maps? They are 'area accurate' maps. I have one on my kitchen wall

http://www.petersmap.com

[John]

Brilliant stuff to which I will inevitably add a point of pedantry. Your filled-in ESW is closer to a modal ESW than a mean ESW as it features every designers' extreme points.

[John]

On a more constructive note, they do a great chocolate cake in Waitrose.

[claire]

Best post of the year - so far.

[Richard]

Interesting post; particularly like the overlayed versions of Britain!

[priyanka]

I agree with Emily, the Peters Map is amazing. It makes you realise how BIG Africa is.

My favourite world map of the moment:
http://www.futuremaps.co.uk/scripts/futuremaps.asp

[Steve]

(North) American maps generally look like the European one. We don't like to split Asia in two. I don't recall ever seeing a map like the one here in all my schooling.

[Kate]

Although this is interesting, it's really not that surprising. Do this with most countries and you will have similar results. I'm sorry to burst your bubble (it's still very cool the way you did this) but as a cartographer I have to throw in my two cents (actually 3.1 cents as an American living in Europe).

Basically what you're seeing here is a result of different projections (as discussed) and resolution/precisions. It's not that England is actually different sizes in these maps, it's just about the different ways that people transform 3D maps onto 2D surfaces which has obviously been noted by previous posters.

Furthermore, different maps are made for different purposes, leading to various precisions/resolutions in the map that accounts for the smoothing and generalization done to the coastlines. There are many different algorithms for doing such a smoothing/generalization and therefore you get many different shapes. Just what type of generalization you do (or what precision you start with) depends entirely on context. In most of these maps, you're starting from a world view so having every detail of the coastline is not only not necessary but from afar will likely make the coastline look like a giant black blob.

Anyways, it all has to do with context and the scale/projection that is most appropriate for the purpose that the map needs to serve!

Sorry, nerd alert. But I reiterate, very cool that you've gone to all the trouble of comparing them all. For a much simpler example featuring the lower 48 USA, see this link from Peter Dana's website: http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/gif/threepro.gif.

[Noel]

Great post, I like the grid of normalized outline graphics.

Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on different projection methods and why country sizes and shapes differ across modern maps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_Projection

I particularly like this graphic which gives you an idea of the amount of distortion introduced into the common mercator map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tissot_mercator.png

I'd also like to point out that the "america-centric" map is not something Americans are used to seeing. We use the same world map as you old worlders.

[Macdo]

Very nice. As a New Zealander I often get nervous looking at maps - a bit like checking for your obituary in the paper every morning. Years ago a medical device company advertised themselves as the largest producer of device X in the free world. This over a background map of the world which had both NZ and Britain (but not Iceland) missing. Pedantically I wrote to them and they explained the map was an artist's impression. I suggested they use a cartographers impression but perhaps that would have been no better.

[ben]

This is a cartography blog? You should know the difference between the UK, The British Isles, Great Britain, and England in that case.

And maybe it's a "viola" case.

[John]

Only comment I have is, as an American, I'm not used to seeing that map with the US in the center... unless I have and just don't realize it. Most world maps I know are wall maps or atlases, and those seem to have NA on the left and Asia on the right.

[Stephen]

To be fair, I'm an American and I think this is the very first time I've seen an America-centric map like that one

[Mike]

Steve is right about the purpose of the map. This is the first thing a cartographer should get a handle on before he makes the map. This means dealing with projection and scale. It's not that map makers don't agree, they just have different purposes for their maps. Turning a sphere to a flat surface will have to give up certain aspects such as area, angles or distance.

[Martin]

@ben:

This is a cartography blog?

Read it again:

"This isn't a cartography blog"

[Kris]

That black shape is not the _mean_ but the _maximum_ shape of england.