About the Cartographer

Abbass Bazeghi graduated from UC Berkeley in 1968 in professional architecture. He was trained as a calligrapher by his father who was a master calligrapher and became as skilled as a professional calligrapher by age 15. He got a summer job in a cartography studio in Tehran, Iran where they lived. All maps were drawn manually by hand in those days and he was hired for text writing on maps. He worked in that studio part time while going to school and full time in summers for four years. 

He learned map making and became skilled enough to get a job in an American company (KDS) in southern Iran in 1959. He worked as a cartographic draftsman in KDS for 3 years before coming to the U.S.A. and attended San Francisco State college for two semesters studying English and then transferred to UC Berkeley. Although he chose architecture as his profession, he didn’t give up doing cartography. 

By 1982 he was computerized and used AutoCAD, an advanced drafting software, extensively. AutoCAD make it possible to do tedious geometric calculations fast and easy and made it possible for him to design and calculate very original equal area world and regional map grids geometries. He has designed 16 original equal area world  maps during the last 30 years. Some of his work was published in Cartographic Perspectives, a scientific journal of the North American Cartographic Information  Society, Number 59, Winter 2008. All his maps are accurate plus or minus one sq. mile per one million sq. miles. 99.999999% accurate. In 2018, one of his map projections was entered in the prestigious Good Design Awards competition, a Chicago based organization that honors designers who have chartered new directions for innovation. Abbass's map projection won the "Good Design", a Global Award for Design Excellence and Innovation 2018.