Dave Marriott of dmob design in Australia had a 33″ diameter plexiglass sphere (with electronics inside to put lights on the outside) that needed map artwork—specifically, earth-from-space artwork. To print artwork and make it into a globe, you need to develop what are called globe “gores,” wedge-shaped sections like a very carefully sliced orange. I took imagery from the Blue Marble image bank at NASA, combined it with shaded relief for the ocean floor from Natural Earth, and made 24 globe gores.

Dave carefully laid the printed pieces on his globe, and set that on its frame, and Telstra had its globe!