Mapping Out Typography

I've seen this global map here and there whilst browsing online for awhile now and it's always kind of grabbed my attention. I'm not sure where exactly it originated, but you can buy it as a full sized poster from a few different retail sites. I've seen it reused a couple times online in different colors, but from what I gather this tan/sepia map is the original.

The typeface used to form the larger countries in the map is a thick and heavy sans serif, in the smaller ones a lighter typeface is used which is also sans serif. It's probably helvetica, arial or something similar as far as what it's named exactly.

Type isn't used exclusively to form the countries, since many of them have odd shapes that letters wouldn't fit into very legibly. Instead there is a lighter section of the brownish background to differentiate land masses/countries from the oceans. Using such large text to fill the countries is a great idea because viewers don't have to strain to see what country they are looking at. This would be a great map for a teacher to have in their classroom or a good poster for anybody interested in knowing international borders.

Thy typeface that is used is very easy to read from a distance and aids in the overall interesting look of the map/poster. I think that if a serif font were used it would work, but not as well as the thick overall structure of the san serif font used. A serif font would leave a lot more empty space in the countries and they wouldn't appear as solid or unified.

I've always been interested in type being used to form objects and this is kind of a continuation of that interest. However, this one is slightly different in that the shapes of the countries actually cut out some areas of the letters. What I've seen in the past tends keep the whole letterform without cutting into it to form a shape. This map has opened my eyes to the fact that the human brain is capable of reading words that have chunks of letters missing. It just has to be done skillfully so it is still easy to read, such as this map.