A semi-automatic way to create your own grid map
In the past year, the grid map style visualization has gained a lot of popularity in the US [2,4]. It has a quite a few nice properties, which inspired me to create one for Thailand.
The rest of this article will explain grid maps, and how I created the grid map for Thailand map you see above.
But if you are interested in using the map already without reading the details of how to create one yourself, jump straight to my gridmap-layout-thailand github repository.
What is a Grid Map, and what are its properties?
In a grid map, each region is represented as a tile of the equal shape and size. The tiles are placed to fit within a grid at positions that approximate real geographic position. If the tile is a square, the grid is rectangular. If the tile is a hexagon, then the grid is like a honeycomb. See the US maps below:
Most of grid map visualizations are choropleth maps that use colors to encode values, such as amount of rainfall, average population age, or political alignment. Creating choropleth maps from geographic maps has some disadvantages, because the…
