As so much of our creative work for Pitney Bowes MapInfo revolves around location intelligence and the power of mapping, I was struck by a new book The Atlas of the Real World. Produced by worldmapper.org, this reference book contains 366 digitally modified maps, known as cartograms. It shows the world in demographics using a wide range of categories from wealth and poverty to Internet use. Here are just a few examples of an atlas of the world as you’ve never seen it before.

Land area

The size of each territory represents its land area in proportion to that of the others. This gives us a very different perspective from the usual Mercator projection we usually see of the world.

Land area

Internet users in 1990

The size of each territory indicates the number of people who were using the Internet way back in 1990. Only 3 million people had access to the Internet then -  73 percent of these were in the United States and 15 percent in Western Europe.

Internet users in 1990

Internet users in 2002

The size of each territory indicates the number of Internet users in the world by 2002. There were 631 million with substantial numbers in Asia-Pacific, Australasia, South Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and China. Hasn’t the world changed?

Internet Users in 2002

The Atlas of the Real World is published by Thames and Hudson