Looking at both maps, I see only one thing: they are both so much worse than new interactive maps... There's too much information and not enough "whitespace". They're so generic, it's hard to find some specific thing on them. If I'm looking for highways, I'm not interested in areas of Chicago. If I'm looking for known places in Chicago, not only is 5 items too short, it's forcing even more information on the map where it's not really needed. Regarding the careful placement... let's see for example: According to Imus's map Plymouth is north of the river, while according to National Geographic it's south of the river. In reality the river goes through the city. If the place is not right, what's the meaning of a "better" placement of it's label?

Regarding typography, I don't like the italic text on Imus's map - once you have many lines in random directions around your labels, it's not trivial to say if some 3-4-letter name containing many round letters is italic or not (is ORD in Chicago italic?) Here it's trivial to figure out from context - when you're trying to determine a size of some city, it's not.

Yes, I'm being negative about this map (maybe a bit too much), but apart from art, is there really a good reason to produce maps like this anymore? I don't agree with the angle this article takes:

> For one thing, that zooming capability means the makers of a single digital map are forced to design dozens of differently scaled versions. This severely limits how much time they can devote to perfecting the layout at each zoom level.

It's actually better because it can show the same information after zooming in, but you can still read the "important" information while zoomed out. Reading any text on this map while standing back from it must be a much harder exercise.

> Imus argues that you can’t truly understand a place if you only use zoomed-in maps on teensy screens. [...] Looking at Imus’ big, richly detailed map offers a holistic sense of what America looks like—how cities spread out along rivers, forests give way to plains, and mountains zigzag next to valleys.

Give me an option to turn each category on and off and I'll see the relations much better. Being able to filter out noise would give many more possibilities of exploration than a "generic map with absolutely everything on it". If cities and rivers are what you're interested in, many maps will provide you exactly that information. Trying to figure it out from a map with 10 other layers is harder.

In short, I disagree with this article trying to prove that "old-style" paper maps can be more useful or readable than interactive, zoomable maps with customisable layers. In my opinion those are always more useful than paper maps. </rant> Not to discredit the work that went into this map of course. I do appreciate this map as art and see what the author was trying to achieve. I just disagree strongly that it's useful nowadays.