Creative Gravity of America
Metro creative industries—screen, sound, games, design, research—are sampled into contour shelves and stacked as an isometric United States. Height is the selected cultural-production signal, not topography. Pick a layer and the terrain shifts under the same cities.
What the surface encodes
Read a taller shelf as a stronger signal for the selected industry. Change the layer to compare where film, music, games, design, or research concentrates. These smooth hills summarize signals around metropolitan areas; they do not measure every location between them. The construction details below explain how the surface is estimated.
Why a custom GeoFrame
The data enters as ordinary lon/lat records and a US outline. The layout owns the contour grid and isometric projection, while GeoCustomChart still supplies hover observation, tooltips, accessible rows, SSR, and the surrounding frame behavior.
import { GeoCustomChart, geoAreaHitTarget } from "semiotic/geo" function isometricContourLayout(ctx) { return { nodes: sampledCells.map((cell) => geoAreaHitTarget({ pathData: diamondPath(cell.x, cell.y, tileWidth, tileHeight), centroid: [cell.x, cell.y], bounds: cell.bounds, datum: cell, group: ctx.config.signal, })), overlays: <StackedContourMap cells={sampledCells} />, } } <GeoCustomChart areas={[contiguousUsOutline]} points={metroSignals} projection="albersUsa" layout={isometricContourLayout} layoutConfig={{ signal: "games", columns: 42, rows: 25, verticalScale: 1.2, thresholds: [15, 28, 41, 54, 67, 80], }} enableHover tooltip={(cell) => <strong>{cell.scoreLabel}</strong>} accessibleTable />