Mona Naimark is a visual artist who paints silks and watercolors. She lives in the USA and in Guatemala. When she is in the USA, she has been an important contributor to ODT projects, in terms of design, production, and marketing. She used her talents in graphic design to provide editorial guidance to this project.

Working on the Population Map with Bob was an exciting process. Sometimes the colors worked on screen, and even with hardcopy…at 8-1/2" x 11", or 11" x 17" the draft of the map looked beautiful... but when we printed out the first actual proof at 52" wide, the color selections looked horrendous, so we had to go and rework our color scheme. We wanted to keep the colors similar to the Hobo-Dyer map, which is useful for doing a comparison of "people versus area". But when India was blown up on the full map in pink (as it is on the Hobo-Dyer), we had to make a change.

Another interesting twist was looking at the country shapes that came out of Paul Breding's first draft of the map. We had to modify some of them to look better (better was defined as more closely approximating the Hobo-Dyer shapes). In order to get the countries bigger (i.e., larger squares for the grid), we also chose to tighten up the space horizontally, bring in the Pacific Islands and Japan closer to Asia, and move the Americas closer to Europe.

Perhaps the most glaring "faux pas" I observed was the original shape of Denmark. Paul had created the shape as a blue cross on top of a purple Germany (this was actually how it appeared in shape on an older, smaller version of the map Paul did in 1999). I had a negative reaction to a shape that had the possibility of conveying some kind of religious symbolism (even if subliminal). I’m glad the design team agreed with me and immediately changed Denmark to a more neutral shape. But I was also surprised that I seemed to be the only one who took notice of this.