Cartograms in Grapher

Our World in Data (OWID) strives to make knowledge of global problems accessible and understandable through interactive geographical data visualizations to see how the world has changed over the course of time. A quick and intuitive view of the world map in relation to population makes it easy for viewers to co-relate the effect and the relative measure's gravity. OWID uses a range of choropleth maps, but size-scaled maps have downsides, primarily because human visual perception associates areas with importance. Furthermore, readily available alternatives use mosaic cartograms, which distort the shape of countries. To solve this problem, in a sentence, the primary objective is to plot a visually conclusive world map by illustrating territories/countries using a method for trading off shape and area. The basic idea of the solution is to distort the size-scaled world map while preserving the shape of countries to generate a population-scaled world map. Furthermore, a manually generated population-scaled world map acts as the reference for optimizing the cost function for better results. Finally, an option to rearrange the cells in the grid to nitpick the details yields the final result of the cartogram.