Putting pins in a map is something I've loved doing for many years

April 30, 2015 3:12 PM

Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it : One man's epic journey to possess a wall-sized world map, which he loves.
posted by swift (59 comments total)

It's beautiful and I want it. In high school I used the rasterbator to create some very large posters in my school (40 square feet or so), but that is not nearly as detailed as this would have to be. It was a lot a cheaper though!

I also love the immediate write-off of the light as too expensive after he dropped something like 1500 bucks on a paper map.
posted by papayaninja at 3:23 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Just remember to visit places in the top two corners, so the map won't fall.
posted by pibeandres at 3:28 PM on April 30, 2015 [33 favorites]

I love this sort of thing - person has a project that they become a little obsessed with and they work through to make it as perfect as they can. Its like the videos of people lovingly restoring ancient motorcycles or figuring out how to create a Cthulu macrame or something. I was so excited for him that he was able to realize his pet dream.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:28 PM on April 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

As a lover of maps, this dude is my kinda nerd.
posted by Kitteh at 3:30 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

All that work and he goes with a Mercator projection? You just can't teach some people.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:43 PM on April 30, 2015 [49 favorites]

Wow, I wouldn't have dreamed that would've turned out to be that difficult.
posted by Naberius at 3:45 PM on April 30, 2015

Web Mercator. Available and free/cheap.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:48 PM on April 30, 2015

Mathematic!
posted by triage_lazarus at 3:49 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

He could have printed it on adhesive vinyl and stuck the map to his wall.
posted by Thing at 3:52 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

All that work and he goes with a Mercator projection?

The Mercator projection isn't the most accurate, but its still the most aesthetically pleasing. I mean, the the Winkel-Tripel projection is great, but if you want to print it out on a rectangle, you end up with corners that are pure blank space. Gall-Peters might be area-preserving, but it's doesn't look as elegant as Mercator or Winkel-Tripel.

Personally, I would have gone with this particular Mercator for purely aesthetic reasons.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:54 PM on April 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

(I mean, seriously, its gorgeous)
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:55 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

All that work and he goes with a Mercator projection? You just can't teach some people.

Maybe he's planning on using it for navigating his room across the seas.
posted by dng at 3:56 PM on April 30, 2015 [10 favorites]

He could have printed it on adhesive vinyl and stuck the map to his wall.

Then he wouldn't have been able to stick pins in it!

I recently did a much-less ambitious and much-more local version of this, involving 12 cork tiles and a map of eastern New York and New England. It does inspire the mind to go on journeys.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:04 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

but its still the most aesthetically pleasing

I present Cahill's Butterfly, previously
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:05 PM on April 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

Every time I look at Cahill's Butterfly, I think the Pillsbury Dough Boy received a tattoo.
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:11 PM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

My roommates were planning a big trip that they eventually scaled back considerably, but for a while our living room wall had a big poster-sized world map, mounted on foam-core, with a bunch of pins stuck in it.

Whenever people asked what it was for, I'd say it's basically a voodoo doll but bigger.
posted by aubilenon at 4:24 PM on April 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

I have a spherical room, so mine is 1:1 accurate, if inside-out. I have a white carpet in the shape of Antarctica.
posted by George_Spiggott at 4:24 PM on April 30, 2015 [23 favorites]

This is cool. As a kid, I had a wall map of the world hanging up over my bed, and I realize now it ingrained geographical awareness in me on a basic level, for which I'm really appreciative. It consistently blows my mind to remember that when many people think about world events, it's fully in the geographic abstract and they're not envisioning the key spatial elements of that country/region in their mind's eye, because they can't.
posted by threeants at 4:25 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Cahill's butterfly maximizes accuracy by sacrificing efficient use of space. Mercator gives the greatest detail in the least surface area.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:27 PM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Love this.

Next step: Room sized globe.
posted by gwint at 4:29 PM on April 30, 2015

I had one of those eight panel GIANT 166" x 112" wall sized maps he dismissed as not detailed enough. I had it pinned onto the ceiling of my apartment. It was neat. Although, waking up to a continent falling onto in the middle of the night is startling.
posted by jeribus at 4:38 PM on April 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Bucky Projection or GTFO.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:38 PM on April 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

With the proper tools (ArcMap or QGIS) this could've been done in a weekend.
posted by unmake at 4:44 PM on April 30, 2015

However, design is normally not the core strength of open source( - ish) projects. The data quality is terrific, but the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary.

For anyone considering making their own maps with their own design taste, Mapbox and their desktop tool Mapbox Studio give you pretty much complete control over the styling of everything using CSS (samples of some built-in styles). OpenStreetMap data and other sources included. Oh, and the application is open source . Good stuff all around.
posted by whatnotever at 4:47 PM on April 30, 2015 [19 favorites]

I guess if he wanted to really run with the Mercator thing he could get a bunch of pins with extra-large heads for marking trips to high latitudes…
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:48 PM on April 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

I wonder how many times his wall says "Google" in tiny, faint letters?
posted by scruss at 4:52 PM on April 30, 2015 [12 favorites]

A college roommate ripped out all the pages of an LA/Orange County Thomas Guide and put them back together, in order, like a big jigsaw puzzle, on two walls of his room, floor to ceiling Thomas Guide wallpaper. One of the walls he chose also happened to be where the door was hung, so once he'd mapped himself in, he cut slits where the door met the jamb.

"Say, John? You mind if I look at your map a sec? I need to figure out the best way to Empanada Man in Lake Forest."

"Go for it, mang."

(John's VCR looped Scarface that whole semester.)
posted by notyou at 4:55 PM on April 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

unmake: "With the proper tools (ArcMap or QGIS) this could've been done in a weekend."

Software wouldn't have helped with the problem of finding someone to print it ("Out of ten print shops I asked for advice, only five got back to me; four immediately told me it’s not possible"), gluing it to a foam mount without creating bubbles or creases, attaching it to his wall, and finding suitably small pins that are still stiff enough to push into the board.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 4:59 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Googling Winkel-Tripel I found this xkcd. I like Dymaxion and type in Dvorak and it's a dirty stinking lie that I like XML!

Also I have really got to find a place to hang the nice National Geographic map I have rolled up doing nothing...
posted by Zed at 5:02 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

That's a nice map.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:11 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Plate-Carrée (equirectangular) seems much better to place on a wall. Less area distortion by latitude (Greenland much smaller than Africa, if still rather too big) and really, why would you throw away the arctic and Antarctica? They're near the ceiling and floor where you'd have to crawl to look at them anyway. And the correspondence of x y coordinates to long and lat does seem convenient for thinking about stuff.
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:13 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Note that I do like the Cahill/Waterman butterfly, it's just not at all suited to the kind of map this guy wanted to create.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:17 PM on April 30, 2015

A defense of Mercator for this application, from a Hacker News discussion.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:18 PM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Beautiful, although I'm a bit confused about some of the difficulties he faced, and this could just be me missing something, or this can be a regional thing. But in New York this (or an approximation of this) can be done for what I have to imagine would be less.

* Mapbox looks awesome! Seriously, gonna bookmark it for when I get around to this.
* There are plenty of print shops which can print this directly onto foam board with flatbed printers. However, printers wider than 64˝ are not common… but common foam board here is 4´x8´, so probably looking at two pieces for a project of this magnitude.
* There are also plenty of print shops that have printers of 74˝ to 104˝, which can print onto adhesive vinyl which can then be mounted on foam board or directly to a wall.
* Lastly, there are printers which print using inks that are waterproof and scratch resistant, again onto vinyl and limited to 64˝.

I've tested (I'm in the business) the three aforementioned technologies (UV flatbed, eco-solvent, and latex) with type sizes down to 4 pts being sharp as a tack on machines properly aligned.

So if you're looking to replicate this, I'd say grab Mapbox, and walk into a local sign shop for guidance.
posted by mhz at 5:29 PM on April 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

[Gazes out window contemplatively.]
posted by maxwelton at 6:50 PM on April 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

When I was a kid, we had a big world map on the dining room wall, and I used to look at it a lot. I doubt it was detailed enough for the guy in the fpp, but I think my folks considered some lack of detail a feature, not a bug: "Ok, so now let's get out the atlas, and see if we can....". Needless to say, we had more than a few atlases, too.
posted by mythical anthropomorphic amphibian at 7:17 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh FFS, tiling is so 80s. Wide format inkjets from Epson, Mutoh, etc. have no limit on length if you use roll feed media, there is essentially no limit on length. There is a whole industry of large format sign production. This could have been printed on a single sheet. But he went to the local Kinkos and printed them on little tiles and cut and pasted them together.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:35 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

But he went to the local Kinkos and printed them on little tiles and cut and pasted them together.

I agree completely except for the part where that is exactly not what he did. But yes, this exact thing would be phenomenally cheaper to do in America at any number of sign shops. Personally, I'd kind of like a map printed onto 4x8 acrylic sheets (or printed on clear vinyl) and tastefully backlit. Probably doable for what he paid if you go to the right company.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:48 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wide format inkjets from Epson, Mutoh, etc. have no limit on length if you use roll feed media

Which is exactly what he used:

We printed the 1,25 Gigabyte data file in two sheets with an »Epson Stylus Pro 11890«, basically a very large 10.000 Euro ink jet [Not your common DeskJet].

posted by mbrubeck at 7:53 PM on April 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the choice of a Mercator projection just spoiled it for me. As another response in the Hacker News thread mentioned, the notion that a Mercator projection can show more villages would be true if you weren't concerned about accurate relative distances in Africa, compared to Alaska.

I just simply don't get the aesthetic argument at all; nope, in general, a map that shows Greenland and Africa in their true sizes is infinitely more aesthetically pleasing than a projection that literally aims to fit a round peg into a square hole.
posted by the cydonian at 8:15 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

He says he chose Google because of the level of information it provided. Except that Google is terrible when it comes to names of bodies of water. I mean, I get that that is not what Google Maps are designed for, but if you're interested in appreciating geography, water is kind of important.

And yeah, boo Mercator.
posted by dry white toast at 8:53 PM on April 30, 2015

I want to be able to print a Stamen watercolor map for my wall.
posted by desjardins at 9:05 PM on April 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Which is exactly what he used:

Nah, he still tiled it.

It wasn't possible to print on a single 3x2 meter sheet, so we cut the map into two pieces.

Yes of course he could have printed it on a single sheet. He just went someplace that didn't have a printer capable of it. In the wide shot the join is glaringly obvious.

Even back in the early 90s, Metromedia in LA had an inkjet printer that could print billboards on one sheet. It was like the old Iris printers, the paper was wrapped around a spinning drum. But this drum was the size of a railroad car.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:08 PM on April 30, 2015

Don't really understand how someone could read the original article and then call them "little tiles", but whatever.
posted by smackfu at 5:48 AM on May 1, 2015

I used to have a big map on my wall! It was great.

When I was in high school, my bedroom had this small... nook, I guess you would call it, where I put my bed. The previous owners of the house had covered one entire wall of this nook with cork board, and that was the wall I put the headboard against. After I got my pilots license, I started to accumulate old aviation sectional charts - they get updated every six months, so if you're lazy about throwing out the old ones they tend to pile up. I took the expired ones and hung them on the cork board wall so that they all aligned; I ended up with a map from Delaware to New England.

I was using regular old push pins for awhile, and then found out that there was a whole map store (!) right near our house, so I drove over there and bought a box of honest-to-goodness map pins, which I used to mark airports that I had visited. Of course, now that everything's digital I don't have piles of old maps to recreate this, but I enjoyed staring at my map and planning future trips to new airports.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:10 AM on May 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

Those of you pooh-poohing the whole enterprise because he happened to use a particular projection which you personally find aesthetically displeasing are perfectly free to do this in your own house with the "right" projection, you know.

For whatever reason, he liked Mercator. For whatever reason, some people like a lot of fake flowers or Thomas Kincaide or pictures of Victorian naked ladies in their bathrooms. Fortunately, individual aesthetic choice is something which we are all individually each free to pursue in our own homes, just as this guy did.

While we're at it, I've always thought that your sheets were a little tacky and that kind of ruined the whole house for me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:08 AM on May 1, 2015 [9 favorites]

Glad to see the Mitch Hedberg joke was one of the first five comments.

I was getting excited to try this myself, until I saw the costs involved. Kudos to this guy for making it happen.
posted by GrapeApiary at 7:22 AM on May 1, 2015

> Those of you pooh-poohing the whole enterprise because he happened to use a particular projection which you personally find aesthetically displeasing are perfectly free to do this in your own house with the "right" projection, you know.

Hear, hear.

> For whatever reason, he liked Mercator.

He doesn't say he liked Mercator. He says:

[5] There are many ways to transform the surface of a ball into a square. Mercator is the most common way, however there’s a problem: the farther north or south you look, the more distorted the outlines get. Greenland looks as big as Africa but is in reality many many times smaller. Antarctica, at the very southern end of the world, is therefore so much distorted that there’s - in my perspective -no value in showing in on a Mercator world map.

Frankly, I find it hard to understand the mindset of anyone who could look at this amazing project and go "Meh, I hate Mercator, it sucks." I know the drawbacks of Mercator (as does this guy), but jeez, talk about missing the forest for the trees.
posted by languagehat at 8:00 AM on May 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

He says "the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" about OpenStreetMap, but it really isn't that hard, especially at the scale he's working with. OSM styling is very, very userfriendly. I'm making a cake-themed one right now.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:37 AM on May 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

A home license of ArcGIS is $100, that can give you any projection you want and then some, provide almost any sort of detail level you need, and allows you to alter nearly any sort of symbology for features you add.

The thing that got me was he spent $450 for essentially some aluminum channel and the idea of a french cleat. That should run, oh, $80 tops even after shipping. Sheesh!
posted by sopwath at 10:10 AM on May 1, 2015

Dude does cool thing.

Metafilter: UR DOIN IT RONG
posted by desjardins at 10:12 AM on May 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

Also, and I say this with the caveat that I'm a geogrump: No map projections are 100% accurate and perfect, they're all distorted in different ways in order to preserve specific aspects (area, scale, direction, distance, conformality). I get that everyone has preferences and the projection is definitely over (and improperly) used, but knee-jerk "mercator = bad" is just lazy.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:25 AM on May 1, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's silly to bag on him for using a projection that he likes just fine, true. But it's a bit silly to bag on people who bring up the problem and say that it matters to them.

So yes, cool thing. Stipulated.

Sure, Mercator ticks more "ideal" checkboxes for its rectangularity, consistent orientation, directional accuracy and oceanic continuity. But sitting in classrooms growing up I started to obsess over that fucking monster Greenland. It just annoyed the hell out of me. Gigantosiberia wasn't such a problem as we're all taught Siberia is huge so just how huge doesn't cause any cognitive problems. Megalaska sorta ditto. But generally I couldn't not see all that oversized stuff across the top.

If we're allowed to say what we would like here, I'd probably go for one of the novel projections like Dymaxion or Cahill's, arranged to make the best use of space, and I'd go ahead and leave the gaps blue as well, as if there were more ocean in them. That's an inaccuracy but one which doesn't affect anything that interests me the way a severe error of scale does. The unconventionality of it, that of not resembling maps I've seen too much of already, would add to the appeal as well, making it more welcome in a decorative sense.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:07 PM on May 1, 2015

"I have a life size map of the United States. The scale says 1 mile equals 1 mile. Last summer I folded it." - Steven Wright
posted by bendy at 2:13 PM on May 1, 2015

For a different take on doing a king-size world map: free download of 35 MB pdf at 1:1 million available here. I'd like to produce a 40 x 20 m (132 x 69') hard-copy display for a gym or plaza. But in lieu of that, you can see an outline version of the whole thing full size, with one-degree resolution, on your own computer: the Cahill-Keyes octahedral Megamap:
How to easily view a 9,000 square foot
Megamap pdf without getting lost:
panning & re-sizing with free Foxit reader
posted by Gene Keyes at 9:43 PM on May 1, 2015

> But it's a bit silly to bag on people who bring up the problem and say that it matters to them.

I would have no problem with people who simply mention that it matters to them. That's not what I was responding to. I was responding to comments like this:

> All that work and he goes with a Mercator projection? You just can't teach some people.

And this:

> Yeah, the choice of a Mercator projection just spoiled it for me.

That's not "Cool, but personally I wouldn't have used Mercator." That's "This sucks because Mercator." Which is lazy knee-jerkism.
posted by languagehat at 7:59 AM on May 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is a great reminder that I want something like this but for a us road map so I can trace all the tells I've taken. I should really look in to that.
posted by maryr at 10:02 AM on May 2, 2015

And also for less that $50 so I don't feel bad using color markers on it.
posted by maryr at 10:12 AM on May 2, 2015

To be perfectly accurate he should have just hot glued a globe to the wall.
posted by imabanana at 12:43 PM on May 2, 2015 [3 favorites]