Mona Naimark is
a visual artist who paints silks and watercolors. She lives
in the USA and in Guatemala. When she is in the USA, she has
been an important contributor to ODT projects, in terms of
design, production, and marketing. She used her talents in
graphic design to provide editorial guidance to this
project.
Mona’s Comments:
Working on the Population Map with Bob was an exciting
process. Sometimes the colors worked on screen, and even
with hardcopy … at 8-1/2" x 11", or 11" x 17" the draft of
the map looked beautiful... but when we printed out the
first actual proof at 52" wide, the color selections looked
horrendous, so we had to go and rework our color scheme. We
wanted to keep the colors similar to the Hobo-Dyer map,
which is useful for doing a comparison of "people versus
area". But when India was blown up on the full map in pink
(as it is on the Hobo-Dyer), we had to make a change.
Another interesting twist was looking at the country
shapes that came out of Paul Breding's first draft of the
map. We had to modify some of them to look better (better
was defined as more closely approximating the Hobo-Dyer
shapes). In order to get the countries bigger (i.e., larger
squares for the grid), we also chose to tighten up the space
horizontally, bring in the Pacific Islands and Japan closer
to Asia, and move the Americas closer to Europe.
Perhaps the most glaring "faux pas" I observed was the
original shape of Denmark. Paul had created the shape as a
blue cross on top of a purple Germany (this was actually how
it appeared in shape on an older, smaller version of the map
Paul did in 1999). I had a negative reaction to a shape that
had the possibility of conveying some kind of religious
symbolism (even if subliminal). I’m glad the design team
agreed with me and immediately changed Denmark to a more
neutral shape. But I was also surprised that I seemed to be
the only one who took notice of this.
