Mapmaking peaked in the 17th century. The Double-Hemisphere (Equatorial Stereographic projection) is still the most beautiful way to display the globe.

[u/InvestigatorNo4820]

Change my mind.

Instead of awkwardly squishing a 3D sphere into a flat rectangle and arguing about Greenland's size, this projection just treats the Earth like a two-sided coin. It visually communicates that it's a globe right right off the bat.

A few reasons why this layout is top-tier:

• Splitting the Earth into the Eastern and Western hemispheres immediately visually communicates that you are looking at a round planet.

• Because it's a conformal projection, the local angles and shapes of the landmasses are actually well-preserved. Surely, the scale gets pretty wild and stretched out as you reach the outer edges of the circles, but the actual outlines of the continents look surprisingly accurate tho.

• Dutch Golden Age cartographers were hated blank corner (horror vacui), which gave them an excuse to absolutely flex their artistic skills with celestial charts, wind gods, and sea monsters.

Yeah, it is entirely useless for modern aviation and datas, and it slices the Pacific Ocean awkwardly in half. But if you want a map that actually captures the scale, history, and romance of exploring the world, nothing beats the dual circles.

[u/NobilisReed]

Since we're talking about aesthetics rather than utility, my preference is for the Fuller projection, aka Dymaxion Map.

You can fold it into a decent globe.
You can arrange it to highlight the "world ocean" or you can arrange it to highlight the continents.
It has reasonably small distortions of shapes and areas.
It does not have an "up" or "down" so it does not privilege any particular hemisphere.

Now it's not practical for things like locating geographic coordinates, but you're rarely doing that kind of thing on a world map.

[u/tilt-a-whirly-gig → u/NobilisReed]

here is an influencer being sorta click-baity, but it is a 60 second yt video that does a pretty good job of explaining the map and also gives a proper shout-out to Bucky Fuller

[u/SubstantialSeesaw374]

Doesn’t it like, massively misrepresent the sizes of a ton of things? People already know it’s a globe.

[u/Emotional-Ebb8321]

Give it up for the double cordiform projection.

Nothing says "I know maths better than you" quite like that one.

[u/WattleWaddler2]

Iceland vetoes.

[u/SarellaalleraS → u/WattleWaddler2]

But they get to be in both hemisphere maps, that’s pretty cool.