Hey Chrissetti, how did you make these types of maps? What sort of Photoshop filter did you use?
Could you provide a few steps?
I'll tell you how I did it on PSP if you want, as far as I can tell they're quite similar.
1. Grab a standard map of the Earth from google (You know the ones I mean, North pole at the top, south at the bottom, Alaska on the far left, Japan on the far right)
2. There's a tool on PSP called 'polar co-ordinates' in the 'distort' section, use that
3. It'll be an ellipse when it first comes out, just push it into a circle shape, et voila.
4. For the South one, flip the map over before you polar co-ordinate it.
The second map could be made a little closer to normal proportions if you were to vertically stretch out the regions closest to the north pole.
Regardless, I wonder why you FE'ers find it so unacceptable that the South Pole-centric model has grossly distorted continents but think it completely fine that the North Pole-Centric one has equally distorted bodies of water. Both models pose equal difficulty in explaining.
Because it's easier to imagine a distorted body of water than land.