Hexworld 1: World Map

I've long been fascinated by hexagonal grids. And maps. So it was probably only a matter of time before I created a world map based on a hexagonal grid: Hexworld.

I'm certainly not the first to try this, but most of the other attempts I've seen are either low resolution or do not try to capture national boundaries.

The obvious way of generating such a map is to take an existing one (in this case, an equirectangular projection) and post-process it. I started down this track but quickly discovered that it produces ugly results. As cartographers through the ages have discovered, making political maps (as opposed to maps for navigation) is more of an art-form that a science. So I dusted off my faithful copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 and hand-filled the 100,000 or so hexagons that make up the land masses:

I initially coloured the regions using five colours (red, green, blue, yellow and pink) and then used a Wikimedia four colour map as the basis for whittling it down to four.

With the seas coloured cyan (hue 180°), it made sense to use equidistant hues for the remaining four colours: red (324°), green (108°), blue (252°) and yellow (36°).

Each "hexel" is given one of 241 unique 8-bit indices:

• One index (0) is reserved for water,
• 193 indices cover the current full UN member states,
• 2 indices cover the UN observer states (Vatican and Palestine),
• 6 indices cover disputed territories (Western Sahara, Taiwan, Abkhazia, Crimea, Kosovo and South Ossetia),
• 28 indices cover overseas territories belonging to UN states (e.g. Falklands), and
• One index (255) for Antarctica.

The lowest two bits of the index encodes the region's colour; except for 0 and 255, which are treated specially. The world is indeed four-colourable!

Obviously, there's no real advantage in rendering a world map using hexagons instead of rectangular pixels or arbitrary polygons. But it's a fun exercise.