We created the Butterfly World Map using open-source data and tools. It displays Earth in a natural-inspired but abstracted color scheme with hillshades and beautiful typography.
All map designs face an interesting challenge: how do you turn the surface of a three-dimensional sphere into a two-dimensional plane? It is geometrically impossible to transform a globe into a flat rectangle while keeping all the spatial properties of the sphere’s surface. So every 2D map is necessarily a compromise.
There are numerous ways to translate the topography of Earth to a flat surface. And while all map projections solve the basic challenge, they all distort the surface of the earth.
One of the most popular map projections is Mercator. In a way it is the default map projection and it is heavily used in magazines, school books and newspapers. Mercator maps provide us with true angles. This is highly beneficial for navigation on sea as you can use the map to plot a course using a compass. But the drawback is that the areas are heavily distorted — especially towards the poles. Antarctica is usually cut out of the maps as it would be too huge to believe. If you draw a circle with a circumference of one Meter around the South Pole, this circle would have the same length as the equator. Mercator maps distort the size of the land masses towards the poles, thus creating completely wrong ideas about the size of the continents.
The Butterfly projection is very different. Its core idea is to divide the Earth into eight octants. An octant is an eights of a solid — in this case a sphere. Each octant can then be “flattened” and arranged into a unified area.
The Butterfly projection is a visually amazing shape. It is both simple and complex. It is symmetric and suggestive. In a way it works like an optical illusion. You are looking at a two-dimensional plane — but at the same time, the overall composition provokes you to imagine a three-dimensional globe. No rectangular map can achieve that. So we wanted to design our own!
Right from the beginning, we were planning to design and develop our map by just using publicly available data and open source software.
In order to reinforce the distinct shape of the Butterfly map, we decided to isolate and emphasise its shape. So the map was printed on aluminium and the butterfly shape was cut out. The result is a map-object and not only a map-surface.
Furthermore, we wanted to have a big map. We were able to render an image with a dimension of 31,000 × 18,000 pixels. This allowed us to print a high-quality map with a dimension of 254 x 142,5 cm! Which is big. And a beautiful addition to our lab space! If you like the map, you can download a medium-sized version from the process documentation.