Ken already made a map for No Pants Day. It was epic! I decided to have a go at National Underwear Day.
I loath rainbow choropleth schemes. But in a week where I have been trying to leave my comfort zone, I’ve decided to go all out and embrace a rainbow-esque color scheme for a noble cause… nostalgia.
It’s not ROYGBIV; it may even be more heinous. And the default view is certifiably not color-blind friendly. (Though in the top header there is a button you can click to change it to a color-blind friendly version.)
Cartographic innovation is about breaking rules. In this case, I was trying to relive those incredibly saturated weather maps on the back page of the front section of the USA Today print newspaper which could be found every morning outside one’s door in nearly every US hotel chain throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
1980s newspaper colors were BRIGHT!
They were anything but nuanced. In hindsight, I fondly recall them as an analog precursor those dreadful 1990s “web-safe” color palettes. Using them breaks every contemporary cartographic rule there is, which is what made this map fun to create.
So the map’s color scheme and block-like design is nothing to envy, but it’s spot on for what I asked for. I used the 1980s color newspaper schema I created and shared in the Map Design Lab on promptcartography.com.
I asked it to design the map like a section of one of those 1980s newspapers – boxy, gaudy, and with 1980s print colors. And then I gave it a dataset that fit the theme perfectly – a county-by-county underwear drying index for August 5 (National Underwear Day) across the US.
The Underwear Drying Index (trademark pending… 😉 is real. It is a concoction of real weather data, created using my favorite Web Mapper Suite – Spatial Data Maker GPT (full conversation and datasets available here). You can view the dataset provenance here.
Happy National Underwear Day! For those outside the US… I know you are missing out. Feel free to refashion this index to suit your national underwear or clothes-drying days. It’s gratis! 😉 Please just CC – BY NY (and maybe B.O.?) – Map Design Commission of the ICA, 2026.
1980s Color-Newspaper Design Aesthetic (Original Intent)
Colorblind-friendly toggle in the header.
Web Mapper GPT Prompt
Hi. I need to come up with some tasteful map ideas for Underwear Day on August 5th. Can you help me brainstorm up to 4 different map ideas – from data-oriented to absurd and artistic image maps?