Recreating a map
January 15, 2025This week I recreated a map from Bloomberg on the state distribution of natural disasters in the United States. Lauren Rosenthal, Brian K. Sullivan, and Christopher Cannon participated in its creation.
Warning: Data may be inaccurate compared to the source.Recreation
Highlights
This is the first map for this year. I have wanted to make this kind of map for a long time, I found that some people call it a "Grid Map", at least it makes sense to me. In my head, and as it has happened to me a lot while learning D3, I thought there was a projection to use or a specific attribute of d3-geo, something like d3.geoPath(grid), but I got a surprise.
- A map that is not a map, but ends up being a map, this is confusing, right? That's how I felt when I discovered that it was rectangles distributed in a grid. I had always thought that there was a way to do it with D3 and that one wouldn't have so much freedom to choose the position of the states. The way to do it seems very comfortable, and logical once I understand it. If you want to dig more into the subject, Krist Wongsuphasawat has an amazing article talking about it: Whose Grid Map is better? Quality Metrics for Grid Map Layouts.
- This is the third challenge where I have to make arrows with SVG. I'm getting more and more comfortable with it and in this one, I was able to get it to appear just as I wanted it to.
- I'm happy to recreate a Bloomberg visualization. I discovered Marie Patino, Rachael Dottle and Elena Mejía some time ago and I try to follow closely what they do and they always surprise me. Also, don't miss the opportunity to follow them at BBGVisualData.