Anyone with a decent knowledge of mapmaking knows that a flat world map (usually created in what's known as an equirectangular projection) becomes extremely distorted around the poles once turned into a sphere. so a budding cartographer is faced with two dilemmas- either create an equirectangular map and then distort it into a fitting perspective or do the opposite and draw a map to best-suit the intended projection and then work back and apply a distorted version of it into a world map.
As always I chose the hard route and, with a half-completed map decided to start from scratch with a realistic projection.
Here is the equirectangular map:
I've had this completed for some time now as a psd file, with ocean currents, prevalent winds, climates, graticlues, etc and have made 3d globes on photoshop before, though i've never been able to make a desired projection i've been happy with.
Using this link, i was able to find a great NASA-made programme that creates up to 90-different projections from a base equirectangular world-map (i have to thank the kind people at Cartopgraphersguild.com for the link). using that simple programme (little-to-no cartpgraphical skills required to use it;it's pretty intuitive) I was able to create a handful of maps, including these two: an Azimuthal equal-area projection and an Equidistant conic projection, respectively.
|Inner Sea - Azimuthal Equal Area|
|Inner Sea - Equidistant Conic|
the projections are very similar though i do prefer the Azimuthal Equal Area, which i think retains the proportions better than the Equidistant Conic (though that might well-be due to the properties i set in the programme).
other than those two i also created an Orthographic sphere, and a Wagner IX projection:
|Elyden - Orthographic|
|Elyden - Wagner IX|