The 500 Largest Cities on a Grid
When I started getting into Graphic Design one of the first things I started doing was data-visualization. I found it fascinating to be able to visualize boring sets of numbers into something that's more digestible and accessible. It's especially fascinated me when it's something well known but that most people don't really have a big picture of.
Probably my first large-scale project was one I named "Grid 500", a diagram of the locations of the 500 most populous cities in the world. Each city is just a single point, even ones that are different sizes, however, due to the densest areas having lots of large cities very close to each other, it's still a relatively accurate representation of population density!
Populous rivers, mountain ranges, and coasts are all very clearly visible in some places, and the more populous a place is the more defined it becomes. Asia holds exactly 300/500 cities, and specifically China holds exactly a quarter of all cities (125/500) while India holds 60, and these areas are definitely the most well defined, as their coasts and other areas such as the Himalayan Mountain Range are clearly identifiable.
Every latitude and longitude point in this visualization is an equal distance apart, meaning that you can perfectly project an Equirectangular map on top of it, and everything lines up!
This was the first data-vis that really took me a long time to make, and one that I am still super proud of! (I originally made it in November 2022. I have since edited it a bit to have my current logo and website.)
Props
This is a re-upload of the first data-visualization I uploaded on my previous publication! Rewritten a bit to more closely fit this blog's style. Here is the original post if you're curious.
The source for the information was taken from World Population Review. Here is a link to the archived version of the data set used at the time.
The original data-visualization was inspired by carykh, who has been a huge inspiration for me for years, and still remains to this day. Check his stuff out!
The original version of this post was inspired by this post by a similar one by _naspli, which I also found extremely interesting!
