Maps for Nordic Culture Fund
—Illustration
2024
For the Nordic Culture Fund 2023 Annual Report, I drew three cartographical illustrations to highlight both local and global reach of the fund’s activities.
Most commonly conventional maps of the world are drawn using the Mercator projection, which gives a highly distorted representation of the world. When applied to world maps, the Mercator projection inflates the size of lands the further they are from the equator. Thus, landmasses like Greenland look similar in size to Africa, although the African continent is actually more than 14 times bigger than the former.
For an organisation like the Nordic Culture Fund, who is most active in these usually distorted fringes of the world, a different approach was needed to represent their region better.
For the annual report, the world map is based on Dymaxion map projection. The map of the Nordics is based on an Azimuthal projection.
These two ways of showing the world have been chosen to reduce the distortion of the shape and size of landmasses compared to other ways of constructing a map. They show the world in a different, but also more egalitarian way.