"as a cartographer interested in clear and effective design, I really believe that cartograms generated from their method are severely over-hyped and far more popular than they should be" - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Amit, do you really dislike these cartograms? It is funny, because if you go to the website (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn...), Mark addresses Andy's complaints by only looking at these maps in context of "normal" maps. But I'm probably only defending him because Mark is generally awesome. - Clare Dibble

I'm generally not a fan of maps for visualizations about people (because the density of people varies so much) but I admit I don't know what alternatives there are. Cartograms are really cool but they're trying to use a distortion to undo the distortion in the map visualizations, and I keep hoping for something that isn't distorted to begin with and thus doesn't need another distortion on top :( - Amit Patel

For example every time I look at the Location display in Google Analytics, it gives a million pixels to Greenland and almost none to Belgium. Which is more important for me to look at? And then it gives a billion pixels to the oceans. Not enlightening. I know the cartogram is somewhat better, by distorting geography to reduce the distortion of people (or other metric), but at some point the geography gets so distorted that it might be better to not have it at all. - Amit Patel

Another thing I look for is a visualization that doesn't put a lot of weight in political boundaries, when it's not visualizing something related to the boundaries. For example, if you show a metric per city, then you're incorporating the history of city boundaries. Houston annexed lots of its neighbors; San Francisco did not. So a bar chart showing population per city (or a metric like deaths or illnesses or births) shows Houston as being huge, even though SF + San Jose + all the other smaller towns could be just as big. (Note that U.S. election maps *should* relate to political boundaries, but a lot of other visualizations shouldn't.) - Amit Patel