30 Days of Maps Day 22 - 2 colours

It's already 22 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's theme is 2 colours - Create a map using only 2 colors. No gradients or shading—just two flat colors. This restriction encourages creativity in design and forces you to think about how to clearly convey your message with minimal color.

For this challenge I've extracted from OpenStreetMap, the areas identified as being used for military purposes in the UK. I've loaded this data into the Power BI dataset as well-known text (WKT). I've then used the formatting options in Icon Map Pro to set the colours to red. I've chosen our "Toner" background style to limit the background to black and white, making the red military areas stand out.

To distinguish between the different types of area I've used Icon Map Pro's ability to used hatching as well as solid fill colours, so I've formatted training areas and airfields with 2 different types of hatching - one at 45° with thick lines and one at 90° with thin lines. I've also set the outline of the barracks to use a dash pattern, rather than a solid line. I've created small images of each of these options, and added them to Power BI's new Tile Slicer to create an interactive legend that you can use to filter the objects on the map. I've added a region dropdown, and a couple of bar charts to represent the amount of area used by the military both by local authority and category.

I particularly like the ability to be able to do this for scenarios where accessibility is important, and colours can't be relied on to distinguish between areas.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Source for Local Authority to Region Lookup: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Source for Local Authority Boundaries: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024