Quote Originally Posted by heffnerc1 View Post
To be honest, I'd rather not reinvent the wheel, and asked in part to see what options were available that work within a printed medium. You've cited several 2:1 map examples, but if you were printing the map on a 2D surface, which one would you recommend as the most realistic for determining the distance between two points?
No projection can do that for an entire globe. Distance will always be distorted. You can preserve one of: distance through a fixed point (or its antipode), area, or angles. Or you can approximately preserve area, angles, and all distances within some restricted extent; the smaller the extent, the better the approximation.

If you just want a typical wall reference map, modern hybrid projections like Winkel Tripel and Robinson are used for a reason. They don't preserve anything precisely, but they do give a good overview. If you want something a bit more archaic looking, you could try Mercator or a hemisphere map, probably in Stereographic. As I said earlier, the hemisphere map can fit in a 2:1 rectangle, or a lower aspect ratio that would look nicer and fit typical paper better if you add polar insets. The others all have lower aspect ratios, and likewise can be adjusted with insets titles and other bits.