The beauty of sketchy-looking maps

Or how to satisfy a Geography nerd

You know that you’re a geography nerd when one of your ideas of “fun” is experimenting with different forms of drawing maps. Maps can be official, methodic, and a bit frightening sometimes, but there’s just something really interesting and appealing, and dare I say, artistic about the art of drawing a good map.

On the more fun and less official side of things, I recently discovered a little gem of a package for R named roughsf that allows you to draw maps like this one:

Pretty cool sketch-looking world map drawn by the package’s creator

It uses javascript under the hood to draw these interesting and sketch-looking maps using georeferenced data in R, almost like someone has hand-drawn one for you. I’m a bit biased on the subject, but I found it fun to experiment with the parameters available and was able to generate some quirky maps really quickly. Some of the stuff you can control:

• fill color
• stroke color
• stroke size
• fill style: “hachure”, “solid”, “zigzag”, “cross-hatch”, “dots”, “dashed”, “zigzag-line”
• fill weight: the thickness of the fill style
• the angle and the gap between two hachure lines