The Equal Places Atlas
An atlas of geographic alternatives
What if geography were rendered cell by cell?
A large country takes up more ink on a conventional map. What happens when you count equal-sized dots, or give each place one tile? Start with the land-dot view to see coastlines emerge from a regular grid. Switch to place tiles to compare a map of occupied land with a map that gives each place equal visual space.
- 01
- Lay down a regular grid
- 02
- Test each cell against land
- 03
- Make density a visible choice
U.S. land · projected lattice
The United States, built from occupied grid cells
A regular screen-space grid meets an Albers USA projection. Cell centers that land inside the country become dots; all other cells stay dark.
Two ways to organize places
Dots preserve the shape of the land
Each dot marks a grid cell that falls on land. Add columns to reveal more coastline detail, or reduce them to see how the sampling works.
Tiles make places easier to compare
A tile map gives each place a regular slot. The arrangement keeps approximate direction and some familiar neighbors while making labels and values easier to scan.
Equal circles give each place equal space
In place mode, every state or country gets one circle. Small places become as visible as large ones, so you can compare their values without land area dominating the view.
Method
How the two grids are built
geographicDotGridLayout samples fitted polygons in screen space. It inverts each lattice center through the current projection, tests that longitude/latitude against the GeoJSON mask, and emits a mark only for occupied cells. The chart-wide origin keeps the grid regular through resizing.
geographicGridLayout remains alongside it for a separate task: one mark per named place. The U.S. version uses an authored state table; the world version snaps projected country centroids to free cells. Both paths emit nativeGeoCustomChart scene nodes for canvas performance, SSR, selection, and reusable styling.
U.S. population:2020 Census resident population. World geometry: Natural Earth via the bundled world-atlas reference. Coarse dot grids can omit islands smaller than a sample cell; place grids intentionally make boundaries, exact distance, and land area schematic.