World According to the Clothing Industry

September 17, 2007 6:51 PM

I need to make or find a large color map of the world, but in proportion to the clothing industry i.e. Honduras and China would be much larger than the United States or Canada.

I've seen maps created that morph the United States into European countries of the same size, but I want to take this in a slightly different direction and have a world map simply based on the clothing industry. I'm thinking sizes in relation to the percentage of clothing the US buys/trades/uses from that country. Hypothetical example would be China at 70%, Mexico at 20% etc etc. Hopefully you can get a visual.

I have access to very large color printers ( Plotter Printers I think is the exact term), but I need ideas on how to create the map. Any programs or already standing maps that I could use with due credit given?

posted by Etta Hollis to media & arts (8 comments total)

Shareware morphing application to alter cuts from a map and then screen capture the result and paste those new, distorted but pretty good, countries on a ocean background? Like that?
posted by Freedomboy at 6:54 PM on September 17, 2007

They are known as anamorphic maps or cartograms if that is of any help to you.
posted by furtive at 6:54 PM on September 17, 2007

Worldmapper's cartogram for clothing exports (enlargement)
posted by rob511 at 6:59 PM on September 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

Good job rob511!
posted by furtive at 7:00 PM on September 17, 2007

a cartogram is exactly what I had in mind, however is there a way to make them look more like actual countries instead of country'esque smears?
posted by Etta Hollis at 7:00 PM on September 17, 2007

1. Build a list of scaling factors for each country
2. Get one of the world maps from cia.gov, in PDF format
3. Load the map in illustrator
4. Pull out all of the layers you don't need
5. Scale each national outline by its respective factor in your list
6. Adjust things so they look reasonable.
7. Add color to suit.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:36 PM on September 17, 2007

Some links to cartogram software:

http://people.cas.sc.edu/hardistf/cartograms/
http://www.mapresso.com/index.html
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/cart/doc/
posted by ManInSuit at 12:20 AM on September 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

If you are using the (cool) worldmapper link above, note that it is not exactly what you asked for: it maps clothing exports, not production as you requested (pretty close in this case, I think).
posted by shothotbot at 12:52 AM on September 18, 2007