viz.

At the beginning of the month, the Daily Mail published a series of distorted maps of the world, using the map area to track some other variable, like HIV prevalence, alcohol consumption, and military spending.

source: The Daily Mail HIV prevalence

Because these maps convey information by distorting an image that most people are very familiar with—the Mercator projection—I think these maps are tremendously effective arguments that there is something wrong or off about a particular situation. Perhaps I have this reaction because the subject matter of all of the Daily Mail’s maps is so loaded—elsewhere, there are a number of distorted maps that track time instead of distance, such as this one that tracks driving times from Ipswich to some UK coastal towns, that don’t provoke this reaction in me; however, this might be because I’m not as familiar with a map of the UK as I am with the world map. Also, I can see a use of this technique that would draw on the connections many people have between being fat and being happy. However, in this case, the distorted image does a fantastic job of conveying that the data being tracked represents something wrong, or off base. The only way to improve on this presentation would be to provide some of the hard data to accompany the images.