Interesting piece of work. The road geeks and cartographer types jumped all over the obvious inaccuracies (like Wisconsin is missing), but certainly no-one had seen the US portrayed like this before. Why not? Part of the problem is that the system is huge. Doing a tube-map style simplification, where routes are separately colored lines and exits are dots or tick-marks, works in a relatively small system like Britain's motorways or the Dutch system, but there's thousands of exits in the US system... not to mention all the 3-digit spurs and bypasses. So Yates' solution—just focus on the 2-digits, and make junctions of highways the only "exits" is a good, manageable way to do it.
Well, says I, I could do better. And that to me is where it gets interesting, because "better" is a pretty fuzzy term, and what I ended up doing and how Mr Yates reacted I think speaks volumes about the divide between art/graphics folk and geography/carto folk.
The divide: lots of people like maps. Lots of art folks like maps. Art folks make a map, but it isn't complete enough, it isn't accurate enough, and map folks hold their nose. Map folks make a map, and there are things that are obvious to a designer that make the map, well, ugly.
This is our professional life practically every day. I'm sure I drive our designerly clients up the wall... but as a cartographer, as a practictioner in the cartographic tradition, I'm working in the mode we all work in: it's got to be accurate and complete, and it's got to look good. Trying to jiggle those two requirements together is what makes the job challenging.
So back to the story. I realized that to do some sort of diagram of the system, I'd have to first abstract it out, untangle it and get a feel for densities and problem areas. So I started graphing it out by number on graph paper. The Interstate Highway system has an ordered system of numbering. North-south roads are odd-numbered, starting at number 5 on the west coast and going to number 95 on the east coast. East-west roads do a similar thing, starting at number 8 in the southwest (or 10 all along the southern tier), and ending up with 96 in Michigan (or 90 all the way across from Seattle to Boston). So you could in theory start with a piece of graph paper and lay out 1-99 in one direction and 2-100 in the other direction and just start plotting.
So that's what I did. It was a godawful mess, and it took a while to wrap up, and I ended up with this. It took a fair amount of comapny time, but they all thought it was pretty cool too. We got some copies and sold them at Art-a-Whirl (our local annual art-crawl) in May. Then I let it sit around, though I figured I would eventually want to let the road-geek community et al know about it. Finally in August I noted it on Carto-talk and sent an email to Chris Yates.
I was surprised to get an irate email from someone accusing me of copying Yates' map, and I replied that no, I hadn't violated copyright (or trade dress or patent or any other legal intellectual property). Thinking about the letter I went back to Yates' site to find the original postings about his map's incompleteness, and came across, well, myself being pretty thoroughly flamed (and the first email accusation explained)
Yates did eventually did write me directly, much more politely than in the forum, and I wrote back. Radio silence since, which is fine, though as I said, I'm happy to discuss any of this.
So this is what gets me: to him I am clearly a rip-off artist, and to me, I am just working in the usual way we cartographers all work—we see a visual idea we like, and we take it, adapt it, and run. On the other hand, to me and the map-heads out there, how dare he release an incomplete map, and to him, for chrissakes it's a poster, lighten up.
There's a paper at the 07 NACIS conference by Mark Denil, "The Myth and Mythology of Map-Art." I suspect (not sure, but I suspect) that this is kind of what it's about.