kleinbl00: Truth in advertising:

Comparing anything to a Rand-McNally is going to make that thing look good.

Looks like a nice map. However, the article is trying desperately to paint all other cartographers as mitten-wearing photoshoppers and David Imus as Mozart. This is not the case - David Imus, from reading between the lines, created himself a calling card to get more work with the cartographers he usually deals with.

There are good map makers and there are good map stores. They mostly cater to architects, GIS offices and the nautical crowd, not Slate reporters. When you go there, you can buy real maps from real companies like Kummerly + Frey:

http://www.mapsonline.co.uk/Publishers/Kummerly-and-Frey/Wal...

I have one on my wall. It's fully six feet by five feet. I even mounted it - it's on 1/2" bevel-cut marine-grade plywood (something Aaron Brothers or similar will do for a couple hundred bucks) so that it looks good. I've had it for about fifteen years now; a girlfriend wanted "a big map" and a big "good" map was, at the time, about $150.

I'm a big fan of cartography. How we see the world is how we interpret the world. This article's a tad sensationalist, though - it's not a dying art and there's more than one clever person working in the field.