#Canada population density map series#

The majority of traffic to the map so far has been on devices where people are navigating through pinch-zoom. “I think it’s due to the tremendous amount of work that Apple and Google have done acclimating people to zooming. “It’s super amazing how comfortable the average person is with zooming in and out of an image illustrating data with scale-free structure,” the designer says. The population map throws about 340 million objects at you at once, and I think most people’s intuition is that that’s just far too many things to display at once.” But as we’ve all become masters of our maps apps, designers may need to change that assumption. “Glancing around my computer’s screen right now I see maybe 3,000 characters of text or clickable regions–3,000 elements. “I think designers are scared of overwhelming their users,” he says, explaining the dearth of similar efforts until now. The band of black along the Eastern Seaboard isn’t much of a surprise, but the metropolitan axis running from Atlanta to Raleigh-Durham is surprisingly dense. It also illustrates some unique regional trends. Other observations from the mapmaker? For one thing, the map shows just how sparse northern Canada really is 64% of the country’s population actually resides south of Seattle. “I love this a lot,” he says, “because it illustrates the extent to which humans in large numbers act like something so simple and biological–like a field of grass growing under the reach of a sprinkler.” As Martin-Anderson points out, that abrupt drop-off lines up neatly with the average precipitation experienced by those areas. But it’s remarkable just how pronounced that drop-off is moving from states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri to the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, and the states beyond. Major cities are dense pockets of black, with more uninhabited white space cropping up as you move from east to west. Then I was curious about western Washington, then Washington, then the whole West Coast, then the U.S.”Īt first glance, the picture it shows is understandable enough.

“I started with the University District neighborhood in Seattle,” he says, “but then I was curious about Seattle. Curious about what his own neighborhood would look like in greater detail, he started plotting census data.

#Canada population density map series#

The designer says he got the idea when he was looking at a series of race and ethnicity dot density maps created by designer Eric Fischer. Martin-Anderson’s map ( which is really worth a look in its full, zoomable glory) is dizzyingly dense, with some three hundred million data points, but it’s also exceedingly straightforward.