Quote Originally Posted by jbgibson View Post
A simple way to imply some of the high-latitude distortion Hai-Etlik mentions is to draw like you have, then progressively smoosh the land masses north-south, as you get further from the equator.
That's roughly doing a reprojection from Mercator to Plate Carree, but you still have to draw Mercator right, although that is somewhat easier than drawing Platee Carree correctly. You do have to be aware that everything in Mercator is getting bigger as you approach the poles. so you are in effect drawing the map at wildely different scales depending on latitude. And it assumes you want the map in Plate Carree in the first place, which isn't usually the case for a finished map as it's not a very good projection for most use cases. It is easy to convert from it to other projections though.