I've been reading a lot of Tufte lately, thanks to my good friend Ryan. Today somebody linked a neat (wikipedia) map of the US Republican Primary results to r/dataisbeautiful. Unfortunately, the color scheme and lack of a legend made me want to gag (not the op's fault, mind you)
So, 10 minutes with gimp and this is the solution I came up with. Still not gorgeous, but at least you can stand to look at it for prolonged periods of time!
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| The improved result, so much easier on the eyes. |
Here for reference is the original map... I put it down at the bottom so my blog wouldn't pick it up as the thumbnail for the post!
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| The offending map... |
Excellent, that is much more soothing to the eyes.
ReplyDeleteI would love to read more about color theory and information graphics, especially for cartography. I often find myself color coding multiple regions like the above. As soon as you need more than three or four colors it's suddenly a very complicated display problem, at least for people without any art training like me.
A brief search brings up fascinating material, as if I didn't have enough to read.
http://makingmaps.net/2007/07/16/map-color-resources/
Not to rain on your visual display of quantitative analysis color scheming, but the real map is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Republican_Party_presidential_primaries_results_by_county,_2012_(corrected).png
ReplyDeleteOffending colorscheme remains, but the data is better and there's a key. I don't know why people post links to files on wikipedia when they always have so much metadata.
I don't consider my parade rained on, I'm actually quite glad for this updated map!
DeleteI too wish people would link to the article the map came from, so that the updated version would have been caught.
:D
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