Thursday, October 30, 2008

Map of the Week-Election Cartograms

You may have heard that the US Presidential Election just is around the corner. The best way to see the true distribution of electoral votes is to use a cartogram. A cartogram is a map showing areas sized by some factor other than area (in most cases population). Cartograms are usually pretty ugly things.


They can be one-legged spiny monsters;








or they can be acid trippy lava lamps.








That's why when I'm shopping for a cartogram, I usually go with the more subdued kind that you get from a serious sedate publication like the New York Times. By the way - if these colors don't look right to you, change them! Many of these sites let you change the states to whatever color and pattern makes you happy.

1 comment:

Michael5000 said...

As you know, I loves me some cartograms. But I tend to like the graph-paper NYT versions a lot better than the acid-trip freehand jobbies.