I thought that too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

Which map projections would you choose? A difficult decision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

If you have to do it yourself anyway, why not make your own projection? I'd do a Dymaxion-style projection onto a truncated icosahedron (Goldberg polyhedron G(1,1), a.k.a. the soccer ball shape), with the poles centered in two of the pentagons, and as many edges as possible over bodies of water. Then I'd print each tile image and plaster it to its own mounting board, trimming the backs of the board edges to 69 degrees on all the hexagons and 73.5 degrees on all the pentagons. At that point, I'd permanently join the tiles with appropriate amounts of contiguous land mass, using brackets, and attach magnets to the remaining edges in such a way that you could assemble them like a puzzle.

I'd rather have a gigantic globe (that can also be dismantled for moving or storage) than have a wall map.

Well, if you want something rectangular, preserving area, with vertical meridians then you automatically end up with a cylindrical area projection. If you want an aspect ratio of 3/2 (approximately) you end up with the Gall-Peters projection. Although if you're prepared to cut out part of the map then you have a lot more freedom in your choice.

Edit: Just discovered that if you prefer a conformal map instead of one with equal area then you end up with the Mercator projection.

Robinson or Winkel-tripel like National Geographic does.

Hammer retroazimuthal, back hemisphere. Which is, coincidentally, also my favorite skateboarding move.

This is really cool looking, and I have no idea what you'd use it for.

And this is just the neatest thing to play with: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/hammer-retroazimuthal/

"As a retroazimuthal projection, azimuths (directions) are correct from any point to the designated center point." (-- Wikipedia, which knows everything and is never wrong.)

It looks like one retroazimuthal variant (the Craig retroazimuthal) is sometimes called the "Mecca projection", so you know which way to kneel at sundown if you're into that sort of thing.

Okay, hipster. Transverse Mercator, south-oriented. https://trac.osgeo.org/proj/wiki/TMSO

Azimuthal equidistant on my house.

I thought that too, but on the other hand it is not readily apparent where you'd get a good non-mercator map raster.

You can just generate one from OpenStreetMaps

How would you approach it? Setting up a renderer with global coverage isn't really a trivial task. It is straightforward, and there are reasonable guides, like https://switch2osm.org/ , but the planet database is just a big database to work with.

(I think I would take advantage of Mapbox's free plan, which allows for 1 custom stylesheet and enough usage to get the image together. I guess there are lots of people who would be happy to render a stylesheet (especially if a modest fee is involved), but I'm not sure how someone on the street figures that out and gets in contact with them)

Yes, I setup a postgres instance a few weeks ago, so that I could render the local area with nik4.py. Lucky for me I already had mapnik and node installed and working, so getting CartoCSS and nik4.py running wasn't a big deal.

I was wondering if you had a specific setup in mind when you said 'just generate', as I did not find the process to be particularly trivial, even for a smaller region (and I do have experience messing around with arcane syntax and command lines).