A “tilegram” is a map made of tiles where regions are sized proportionally to a dataset. The name is short for a tiled cartogram. Tilegrams can represent demographic data more truthfully than conventional, geographic maps, while still retaining a familiar appearance.
This free, open-source tool enables news designers and developers to browse existing tilegrams or make their own for use in interactive and print publications.
Even with computer automation, tilegrams can be time-consuming to produce, because, to be effective, they require a human eye to verify that geographic contours will be recognizable and meaningful to a general readership. For this reason, you're encouraged to begin with existing tilegrams before authoring your own.
This manual proceeds from the most basic to the most advanced usage case.
On load, you will see a ready-made tilegram, as selected in the Load existing menu. Try selecting other options to browse around.
If you are satisfied with the tilegram as it appears, go right ahead and Export—as TopoJSON or SVG—using the buttons at the lower left.
Designers will be able to import the SVG into their software of choice (e.g. Illustrator) and developers will be able to pull the TopoJSON into web applications. In both cases, the data is identified with the US FIPS code.
Suppose you've loaded a tilegram, but want to reshape a region. Maybe Florida looks too heavy, or Missouri is streched too thin.
Click step 2: Refine your tilegram.
Click and drag any tile to move it around.
To move many tiles around, click and drag a rectangular marquee around them, and then drag them around.
To move just a specific region around, double-click any tile in it to select them all—then drag them around.
You can also hover over a region in the State Tiles sidebar area to see that region's tiles highlighted on the map.
Under State Tiles, you'll see a list of each state with a number and a hexagon.
The number indicates the delta inaccuracy between the number of tiles that region currently has on the map and how many it should have, based on the dataset. If the delta is positive, that region has too many tiles on the map. If the delta is negative, it doesn't have enough tiles on the map. If there If there is a warning sign, then that region doesn't have enough data for even a single tile on the map at the chosen resolution.
(Why does this happen? It is computationally very difficult to produce tilegrams which are accurate and recognizable. As you begin to make cartograms, you'll appreciate the difficult trade-offs you must make between preserving the approximate shapes of regions and their adjacency to other regions.)
To remove a tile from the map, click it, and hit 'Delete' on your keyboard.
To add a tile to the map, click the hexagon from the left sidebar and drag it onto the map.
If you've made it this far, you are ready to produce your own tilegram.
Select Generate from data. You will see the tilegram generated before your eyes, by beginning with a conventional geographic map and then progressively resizing its regions to conform to the selected dataset.
Under Dataset, you may select one of a few prepared datasets, or input your own Custom CSV, by pasting in a dataset in the format specified, using US FIPS codes.
Then you may alter the resolution in two ways. The most visually gratifying is to click and grab the Resolution slider and watch as the tiles are re-computed in realtime. The other, more statistically accurate way is to click into the Per tile field and entire your desired value per tile.
For example, if you are using population to scale the regions of your tilegram, you might enter '500,000' so that each tile corresponds to (approximately) five hundred thousand people. Then, each region's number of tiles is rounded to the nearest multiple of that number. So, in this same example, if you have a region with 700,000 people, the metrics would show that you need one tile and if you have a region with 800,000 people it would round up to two tiles.
As you adjust the Dataset and Resolution/Per tile, you'll notice
that the deltas under State Tiles update dynamically. Please remember
to take note of them and ensure that they all read 0 to make responsible
tilegrams.
If you use, enjoy, or can't stand this tool, we'd love to hear from you at @pitchinc or info@pitchinteractive.com. We hope to include more example tilegrams in the application.
Happy tilegramming!