The 30 Day Map Challenge is something I got to admire for the last two years without being able to participate because of either work or personal reasons. This year, I got to see Kate Berg's talk from NACIS 2021 and thought that if I start a head of time and preprepare my maps I'll probably be able to do the complete challenge.
It's (a)liveeeeeeeee! https://t.co/KqqGrDYUci
— Kate Berg 🥔🗺️ (@pokateo_) October 25, 2021
And then I thought, "hey I just made all these color palettes for QGIS, why don't I use them?", and so I set out to create both the #30DayMapChallenge maps and make all of them with #30DaysOfPokemon.
I copied Kate's Google Sheet where she conducted her brainstorming and got working, I started a repository so I could both present and keep track of all my maps and started planning.
Day 1 - Points
Figured I'd start from the start, and might stick a few nice tricks with QGIS expressions along the way (the sweet summer child I was a month ago) so I went with the simplest dataset I had, the QGIS world easter egg and did some expression magic using it. I used the a geometry generator point symbol to show the centroids of all countries ( `centroid($geometry)` ) and complicated it just a tiny bit further with a disjoint, I then styled everything with the Abra color palette and moved on.
This was the expression I used with rule based symbology to filter what to show:
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Days 2 & 3 -Lines & Polygons
For the second day I was working on a map of San Francisco anyway, and it had one theme for the roads and another for the buildings so I figured that why not use that project and add a little extra.
I thought "hey, I could clip the map to look like a pokemon, that would make it look good with barely any work" (again, you sweet summer child). So I got digitizing on the Nidorinos and used a theme for roads.
It was of course only after I finished those two maps that I saw the edit nodes button in the map layout, so it was a terrible experience to trace the shapes based on a picture without stopping (or being able to pan without zooming in and out).
Day 4 - Hexagons
Going to Natural earth since I had the data already, I chose a continent and went with it, created a continent wide 50KM high and wide grid of hexagons, did a spatial join to Natural Earth countries and colored by the latest population estimate.
The colors obviously have 0 meaning because I didn't scale the color palette in any way, but Pikachu provided some nice shades of yellow and the pinkish red from his cheeks.
Day 5 - Data challenge 1: OpenStreetMap
This was easy since I work and play with OSM data quite regularly, but I wanted to go local for the next map, and foolishly chose the Onix palette for the actual street map (even though he would have been much better for the monochrome day 🤦). So I made a simple street map of Tel Aviv (where I work) and had to zoom in a bit since I got lazy and didn't want to work out how to show the right shoreline so here we are with a few streets in central Tel Aviv.
Days 6, 7 & 8 - Red, Green & Blue
Days 6,7,8 all show the same data, but in different color palettes,
For this I took a similiar approach to how my wife makes these maps, but in pokemon colors.
I obviuosly had to go with Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle, Since I had the data and maps prepared by my wife, all I had to do was recolor them so these were probably the easiest maps I've done.
Day 9 - Monochrome
After foolishly having chosen Onix for map 5, and being committed to using only pokemon palettes, I had to find another monochrome pokemon palette, and luckily, there are 2 of them (probably more, there are a lot of pink-whitish blobs) Ditto to the rescue. showing the rivers and lakes of North America, rivers width was determined by their scale.
Day 10 - Raster
Keeping strong with the lazy maps, I just downloaded this freely available DEM of Mars, and recolored it with false colors using the Gastly palette, It turned out as one of my favorites from the challenge.
Day 11 - 3D
This took a bit more work, but I just took roads from OSM, and the buildings layer Tel Aviv municipality freely available and extruded everything.
Colored with the Porygon palette, because it's 3D.
Day 12 - Population
I downloaded some data for the third data challenge early and it worked quite well for population so all I did was normalize the population change between 1975 and 2015 and color it in Victreebell.
The summer child here didn't expect the crash because of the Open Zoomstack land layer in the background, but again I hit the ground running with this challenge, and didn't plan enough ahead.
Day 13 - Data challenge 2: Natural Earth
Now this was a lot of fun and since all I did was dump Natural Earth layers and style them with two Pokemon palettes, and it turned out great in my opinion, this was one of my favorite maps from the challenge, and the Nidoqueen palette was amazing for the bathymetry data.
Day 14 - Map with a new tool
I knew Unfolded Studio existed for quite some time now, but never got around to using it until making this map. Going back to San Francisco and since they had the elevation data and I could recolor it very easily.
I added Venusaur to the recording by creating a new HTML element and sticking him in there.
Day 15 - Map made without using a computer
I actually made two maps for this day, the first one was just a screenshot from of the Kanto region Map from Pokemon Lefa-Green, but my wife said that was cheating, so I had to draw (trace) a few blocks from my neighborhood with basically the same Golbat colors.
Day 16 - Urban/rural
Used the GHSL urban centers layer again for this, because I got lazy again.I scaled the Scyther colors by the scale rank, also used an expression to filter all the centers outside of Italy.
This was the expression:
if( intersects( transform( $geometry,'EPSG:4326',@project_crs ) , geometry( get_feature( 'ne_countries','name','Italy') ) ), "scalerank" ,99)
Day 17 - Land
This was again a hole in one, since all I did was load the layer, hit single pseudocolor, and select the palette that looked best, in this case Rhyhorn. I took the highroad though and made a globe so it would like I put in some effort there. The QGIS globe builder plugin came in handy here.
Day 18 - Water
I wanted this map to look a lot different, but I realized I used the wrong pokemon a bit too late (thought Seel evolves into Seaking, apparently I was wrong). So I just stayed with the coloring and the labels I could style to the best of my ability (I am a rather lousy cartographer), and I was glad to see this map done and published (most of my posts were scheduled ahead of time).
Day 19 - Island(s)
Remembered seeing some articles about an island within a lake on an island, So I made a search and found two of them pretty fast, both Inception island in Canada and the Taal volcano island in the Philippines are actually one step further, they are islands within lakes within islands within lakes.
Used a rather underused feature in cartography (IMO anyway) which is showing and recoloring only specific layers in vector tiles, in this case I used some esri's OpenStreetMap vetor tiles basemaps.
The Lapras color palette was great for styling this map, ground and sea colors with a bit of gray for highlighting the islands.
Day 20 - Movement
This was very last minute, and banged out in about half an hour of work just because I came across the data and this was the only map I've still haven't made that was fit for it, so I pushed my plan for day 20 to day 25 and got cracking on doing this using some of the new features in QGIS 3.22 (annotation layers for example).
Used Tentacruel to visualize Hurricane Katrina's path from 2005, and simply shot the video directly from the canvas, not exporting anything through QGIS, although it is possible but QGIS generates the individual frames instead of a video.
Day 21 - Elevation
I loved the isle of Skye in Scotland, it had a magical feel to it, we had a great time from driving there through the glens through sleeping in a campsite by the water, going for hikes and taking a stroll around Portree.
Wanted the Tanaka contours to look a bit better, but the elevation data gave me a hard time before I could visualize it, so I just went with the style from QGIS hub and realized that it's as good as it's going to look at this scale. Snorlax helped out a lot with the overall look and feel and like Lapras from map 19, it's just the right palette for certain simple maps.
Day 22 - Boundaries
Found this data set too late and too many of my maps were ready so the last one I could make with it was boundaries. I will be going back to using middle earth data again, I won't be using the Doduo and Farfetchd palettes again, they, did not turn out so well.
If you want to find middle earth data click here
Day 23 - Data challenge 3: GHSL Global Human Settlement Layer
Again feeling a bit lazy here, and since I already had the layer and used it twice, figured, why not choose a nice palette and find a location I haven't used yet.
So this is the urban center of Iceland according to the GHSL, there is only one, so I added some nice natural features to make the map less boring.
The Nidoran♀ palette gave it a lot of really nice colors with the glaciers and bare rocks of Iceland.
Day 24 - Historical map
This is one of the only maps that I made the day of, and mostly because I didn't know what map to make until the last second where I just looked for a classically historical data (John Snow's cholera map) and repaint it over current OpenStreetMap, again using the trick of repainting specific vector tile layers in the Kabutops palette instead of actually creating a styled basemap.
While the palette is rather boring, I like the geometry generator lines which were a breeze to make with some of the relatively new expression functions, this was the geometry generator expression:
overlay_nearest( 'Pumps',$geometry)[0], -- find the nearest pump
$geometry
)
Day 25 - Interactive map
Going back to map 21, I took some of the photos from my honeymoon trip and created a layer of our trip through Scotland (mostly), England (mostly on the way to Scotland) and (a tiny bit of) Wales.
Since it's a honeymoon map had to use a lunar pokemon and styled it with Clefable, the map looks best on the desktop, since I still haven't had time to adjust the style to mobile viewing.
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Day 26 - Choropleth map
Last map I made, and it cam back to bite me in the rear rather fast, with a barrage of comments in French from Belgians that decided that invading other countries was probably not such a bad idea.
Styled it with Mewtwo to make it more ominous, but it's basically just a choropleth map of distance from Belgium.
Used PostGIS to query and calculate the data and styled obviously in QGIS.
this was the PostGIS query
WITH belgium as ( SELECT geom, name FROM ne_countries WHERE name = 'Belgium' ) SELECT n.name,n.geom, st_distance(n.geom, belgium.geom)/1000 dist FROM ne_countries n,belgium
Day 27 - Heatmap
The sweet summer child that I am thought "hey, google just published this great dataset of buildings in Africa, why not use that?"
Both my work and home (which is a bit better actually as I was a freelancer up until recently) didn't have enough storage for it.
SO... last minute I went the lazy way, yet again, and styled a service in Google Earth Engine showing, in Magmar colors (because it's a heatmap...) the average temperature globally, average between January 1st 2020 and January 1st 2021 that is.
Instead of a classic heatmap, it's a map of where it's hot and where it's not.
The Himalayas and Tierra del Fuego look like they're burning and I love it.
Day 28 - The Earth is not flat
This globe was actually one of the first maps I've made, and I made it using the excellent guide from QGIS Map Design - Second Edition by Anita Graser and Gretchen Peterson, and I can't praise that book enough.
I took more time to style the background of the map layout instead of the map itself, which I chose the Machoke color palette for because it looked like I used the Topological Coloring tool.
Day 29 - NULL
I knew what palette I was gonna use for this day, but not what data, except I knew I wasn't that lazy that I'd post an empty map and say it's NULL island (I do respect the people that did though), So I just played around with Natural Earth Layers until I found this combination of countries without railroads which I styled with the (non existing) MissingNo color palette.
Day 30 - Metamapping day
For this I made a map gallery along with this post.
The gallery is available here - https://bogind.github.io/30DayMapChallenge/day30.html
and a small peak at it is available at the begining of the post and a slightly better quality version just below.
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