Cartogram of Oregon Counties

The state of Oregon’s Open Data Portal provides access and assistance to a whole number of datasets and charts. I’ve been interested in looking at the similarities and differences between counties and locations (mostly in healthcare). I’ve done a few instances of small multiple charts, but wanted to place all the little county charts together in a better context – about where they are situated in real life. So, I began trying to make a cartogram template of Oregon, where all the counties are the same size.

I began with a few quick sketches, but found I was erasing more than I was drawing; so I ended up cutting up small pieces of paper for each county and moving them around. I found this worked very well and recommend it to anyone trying to do something similar. However, there were still some issues I couldn’t get around.