A semi-automatic way to create your own grid map

Map of Thailand — Each province is colored by the length of its name in English. Name abbreviations are from Wikipedia.

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.