Category Archives: January

World Nutella Day (36/365)

Posted on by

Today is one of those daft days – a day celebrating Nutella, that disgusting gooey spread (well, I don’t care for it but I believe others do). Anyway, here’s a map showing where in the world you can and cannot get it.

The first iteration was totally incorrect. I’ve no idea what dataset the AI was trying to use but it showed Australia and New Zealand as not having it. I know that’s wrong so I sourced the actual data from the Nutella site and redirected the AI. Sometimes you need to double check what it’s claiming is correct because, well, often it isn’t.

Nutella availability map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Using the Nutella site as a source (https://www.nutella.com/int/en/nutella-around-the-world) please make a world map of countries where you can, and cannot get the nutty chocolate spread Nutella. The map should be artistic with countries that you can buy Nutella spread with thick gooey Nutella goodness. Leave countries where it is not available as bare toast.

Happy Hot Chocolate Day! (31/365)

Posted on by

Happy Hot Chocolate Day!

It’s been a chilly January in much of the United States. Pretty standard for Minnesota, where we often reach -30-degrees C in December, January, and even February, but still…

I was pumped to see this National Day on the calendar. It got me thinking… Is hot chocolate even a thing across the entire US?

Let’s find out…

Map showing likelihood of National Hot Chocolate Day being celebrated in the US by state.View Map

Tools Used

  • Dataset Doctor GPT
  • Web Mapper GPT

Dataset Doctor GPT Prompt Used

Can you create a spatial dataset of the average daily temperature by US county OR, if not county data is not available, by US state on January 31 or, if that date is too specific, in January broadly.(Whatever averages you find, e.g., past 10 years, past 20 years, past 50 years, etc., whatever is easiest to fetch is fine and it doesn’t have to be current… any dataset within the past 20 years containing this info is fine. I’m going to use this information to create a silly map about how likely National Hot Chocolate Day is to be celebrated across the US on January 31. Fields needed in dataset (if county data isn’t possible to collect, skip county-based fields listed below, no worries): – County Name – State Name – County Avg Temperature – State Avg Temperature – State FIPS – County FIPS – Data source: Name I would love this in exported as a shapefile or geojson format with geometry from Natural Earth Data if possible. Otherwise, a CSV file with the data is fine as well. I can join it to a spatial dataset later. Thank you!

Web Mapper GPT Prompt Used

Hi. I would like to create a friendly, atmospheric, and chocolately looking map of the United States in an Albers equal area projection (for the contiguous US, I don’t care what Alaska and Hawaii projections are used, but those two states should be insets) of hot chocolate consumption. I have a GeoJSON dataset of all the states with geometries, and their average January temperatures. Please create a five-class breakdown on the temperature field, and use a brown color value to display, in choroplethic fashion, which states are most likely to celebrate National Hot Chocolate Day on January 31 based on average temperature. Have a small legend that labels each classification. The legend title should be: “Likely to celebrate?” Category titles from highest temperature average to lowest temperature average: – Not at all – Could be persuaded – Why not? – You betcha! – Two or three cups minimum!!! When a user clicks on a state, show the state name and the average temperature value for that state in Fahrenheit. Aesthetically, the map should have chocolately brown themes, and the oceans should have some graphic design marshmallow like icons looking like they are floating (e.g., partially submerged). Put about 5-8 of them in the Pacific Ocean, 4-7 in the Atlantic, and about three in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t resize or change. The entire US should appear in the window. There should be no “below the fold” everything should fit in the window. The title of the map (upper-left) should be across the top and read: Happy Hot Chocolate Day, 2025! Subtitle: Which states are likely to celebrate based on average January temperatures? Upper-right: hamburger menu. when opened: Sources: NOAA, Dataset Doctor, Web Mapper GPT, and any other attribution that may be required from the software stack used. Clicking anywhere outside of this window automatically closes it. Important: make sure this window/modal/panel is closed when the map opens. Thanks! On mobile devices, ask the user to tilt the phone to landscape before viewing the map. Then, when tilted, ensure the map fills the window above the fold (and also without the title interfering with interacting with the map. Thanks! Use Google Fonts to create a warm, inviting, hot chocolately over the top camp fire vibe. 🙂

Happy Martyr’s Day! (30/365)

Posted on by

Happy Martyr’s Day! It’s a national day in India celebrating Mahatma Gandhi.

To honor his legacy, I created a map of his historic march with information along the way at each stop. Again, doing one of these a day in my spare time doesn’t leave much time for innovation or design, but I can imagine coming back to this and adding non-proprietary imagery and details along the way.

Also, this is my first ever map in Hindi. There is a button in the upper right. You can switch between English and Hindi there. I cannot vouch for the Hindi translations, but I assure you, they are better and more accurate than what I would have been able to do before prompt cartography. I hope they serve this great human being justice.

Map production time constraints and language barriers aside, Gandhi inspires me (particularly in today’s geopolitical climate here in Minnesota).

I am proud to give Martyr’s Day a map of its own in our #365DaysOfMaps challenge.

Map of Gandhi's march.

View Map.

Tools

Prompt Used in Web Mapper GPT

I would like to make a map of Ghandi’s travels for India’s National Martyr Day. I have a CSV dataset (attached). Please keep this map pinned to India and Bangladesh area — i.e., cannot pan out of these bounds or zoom out past South Asia. Please use a topographic base map and if possible use a mask that that has India’s flag colors lightly embued in it to give it an India vibe. The mask must be below the mapped data, but abover the base map. Please use point symbols that are in India’s Orange color (on the nation’s flag, with India’s Green slight drop shadows. When a user clicks on a point, a pop-up info window should appear showing all th English information such in the following visual hierarchy order: – Stop Name (Place Name) and Province – Description – Context (when available) – Date (near top but subdued) – Sources (as a bulleted list) Please use an aesthetic and palette that ties to India’s national colors. Keep is subdued. The title should be Display Text in the format of 1950s Newspaper Headlines. Come up with three good titles dealing with Martyr Day and Ghandi. perhap something akin to “The Martyr’s March”. Pick your favorite and include it in the upper-left hovering over the map in large, print-map like style. No background box. (Make sure you use some effects to make it legible over the base map, e.g. drop shadow, etc.). Make the title stand out. In the upper-right, include a hamburger icon that when clicked shows a menu that includes a link to Sources. When that is clicked show a modal splash window with sources and attributions. It should close when someone clicks anywhere outside of it and it must not be open when the map opens. Also include a button that says “Hindi” in Hindi, please. When the user clicks this button, the map pop-ups and title and hamburger menu items all switch to Hindi. (There are Hindi fields in the dataset replicating English fields. Switch them in the popups, please.) The menu item the user clicked that said Hindi (in Hindi) now says English (in English). If the user clicks this, everything switches back to English, including the pop-up windows on the map.

Happy Jigsaw Puzzle Day! (29/365)

Posted on by

Happy National Jigsaw Puzzle Day!

As the weather hit -30-degrees C here in the Free State of Minnesota this past week, I was thrilled to see this day arriving soon. Puzzles are how we socialize without talking in the winter in these parts during the winter.

This was the fastest “map” I’ve created yet this year. Took about five minutes to get it working. I used regular ol’ ChatGPT to create the puzzle maps using screen grabs from Open Street Maps (and Contributors) website.

Maybe you’ll recognize some of the places. Maybe you won’t. Have fun!

OSM jigsaw puzzle image
View Map

Credits

ChatGPT Prompt

Link to full conversation

Hi, I would like to make a puzzle out of this Ope Street Map image I have for International Jigsaw Day. Could you create a simple website for me that does the following: – When a user visits the site, they will see this image broken up into a variety of scattered jigsaw pieces on a faux wood background. The pieces will be scattered and not necessarily oriented correctly — though all face-side up. On the table will be an outline of the size and location of the rectangle map area they must fill in with the pieces. They will then select pieces and drag them to the correct spot. They may rotate pieces by right-clicking or left-clicking with the Alt key pressed down and pulling up or down. All pieces begin in random 45-degree orientations. Rotations move in 45-degree increments when users rotate. It must be possible to align all pieces correctly to eventually fit. The pieces of the map should be roughly equal height and width. Use standard jigsaw cuts. Try to make them unique enough to allow a user to discern when pieces go together by looking at the cuts. But some duplicate cuts are permitted. Please make the puzzle 25 – 40 pieces. Whatever works best for the image and layout. On mobile devices, ask the user to rotate their phone before beginning. Ensure that the puzzle feature is above the fold when the mobile device rotates and gets resituated in the browser window. There should be a simple title under the pieces but when the puzzle is finished above the puzzle: Happy Jigsaw Puzzle Day! Elsewhere on the site, perhaps in the lower-right or upper-right, you decide, there should be a hamburger menu. When clicked, a small pop-up shows bulleted: (https://openstreetmap.org) and [ChatGPT](https://www.chatgpt.com) – For [#365DaysOfMaps](https://mapdesign.icaci.org) – Source: Open Street Maps, OSM, and Contributors, 2026. – Specific map scene available [here](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/50.08042/8.24172)

Happy LEGO Day! (28/365)

Posted on by

It’s International LEGO Day. Sorry, let’s show some more respect…IT’S INTERNATIONAL LEGO DAY!!! Where do I even start with this one. Another where I think it’s a case of just seeing what AI can generate with some fairly broad prompts rather than anything too prescriptive.

The day itself marks the day on which the inventor of LEGO, Danish carpenter, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, first submitted his patent for the original LEGO brick in 1958 — but his plastic brick was actually invented in 1949. And just because it’s a bugbear of mine it’s LEGO, not LEGOS. They aren’t plural, even when multiple bricks are used together.. The name LEGO comes from the Danish words “LEg GOdt” which translate to “play well”.

Fun fact while i was doing some research for this map – apparently LEGO is the world’s largest tyre manufacturer, producing over 400 million small rubber tyres each year for all its various models, mostly in the LEGO Technic range.

Anyway, enjoy the map but more importantly today – build some actual LEGO and Play Well.

Playful world map made from Lego

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

I would like you to use all of your map prowess to build a map to celebrate International Lego Day. I am imagining a three-dimensional map on a typical brick baseplate. The map must look like it is built from Lego bricks using the typical Lego colours. Perhaps the map shows the location of Lego stores across the world using a Lego lightsaber as a vertical point symbol. Maybe the bricks can be used to show elevation changes, appropriately coloured. I’d like the map to be adorned with all sorts of Lego style images and graphics. The map should be titled “Lego – Play Well!”, and in a Lego styled typeface. Come on – I know you can build a wonderful, imaginative, and playful map.

Happy Thomas Crapper Day (27/365)

Posted on by

Only one day appealed to me for a mapping tribute today – Thomas Crapper Day. A day dedicated to the English plumber who invented the modern flushing toilet in the late 1800s that we literally still use today. Though I must admit I was a little short of ideas for this celebration. Should I map world sanitation? Maybe the location of Crapper & Co manhole covers in London? The average number of times people poop every day? Who knows! But rather than stress it I thought I’d literally leave this to the AI to flush out.

I normally don’t put in too much of the conversation I have with the AI preferring to just show the prompts as a way to show how the map was made. But instead, I’m going to paste in the entire thread because it’s fantastic! I ended up asking AI to create four of its suggestions! The result was a hybrid poster with four interesting map-like depictions.

And for those of you reading this on the pot (crapper, loo, toilet etc)…you know who you are!

A map celebrating Thomas Crapper

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

You said:

Happy National Bubble Wrap Day (26/365)

Posted on by

It’s National Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. Whether you use it for packaging, or as a stress-relief tool this stuff has been around since the late 1950s. Curiously, it was originally designed as a wall covering (has anyone tried that?) but as packaging it was IBM who first use it to wrap and ship computers. Anyway, here’s a quick map made of bubble wrap. It needed a couple of iterations but it’s a simple illustrative map, simply made. Which country are you going to pop first?!

Illustrative map made of bubble wrap

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Can you make an illustrative world map that looks like it’s made out of bubble wrap. The overall layout should show two hemispheres, using typical arrangement with a western hemisphere map on the left, and an eastern hemisphere map on the right. Two small azimuthal projections of each polar region should appear in the bottom two corners with the Arctic in the bottom left, and the Antarctic in the bottom right. Each of the circular maps should also look like they are made of bubble wrap. Countries could maybe differ using differently sized bubble wrap but please avoid all colour – this should just look like a piece of bubble wrap. The title should read “The world – wrapped!”

Happy International Mobile Phone Recycling Day (24/365)

Posted on by

You may very well be reading this blog or social media post on a mobile phone (cellphone for my American friends), but how many of those phones have you got through in the past year, or the past decade? With increasing amounts of electronic waste I thought I’d focus on who are the world’s largest producers of small IT equipment waste per annum.

The first job was finding data, which our trusty AI assistant did with relative ease after a bit of searching and scraping. And the first map it created was a fairly impressive choropleth map of the data except it was total tonnage, by country which, of course, needs to be represented as a rate on a choropleth. Rather than forcing the issue I decided to start the mapping process again and see if it could create a Dorling Cartogram. Imagine my surprise when it did..and all I needed was a little refinement to get to what I think is a pretty impressive end-result.

A Dorling Cartogram of e-waste

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Please create a map to help shed light on it being International Mobile Phone Recycling Day. I want the map to show the worlds largest producers of electronic waste from mobile phones. The data should be measured in tonnes, per annum. The map style should be a Dorling Cartogram, where a single circular symbol represents each country, sized proportional to the data value for that country. The colour of the circles should range from yellow (lowest tonnage) to dark green (highest tonnage). label the map with the 6 largest e-waste producers and add the actual tonnage. Create a legend that supports the map to show indicative sizes of circle for three different tonnage quantities. Add an appropriate title and ancillary graphics in an electronic style, perhaps like a motherboard.

Iteration 1:

This is on the right lines for sure. Can you add more country circles to represent their annual tonnage of e-waste for this category? Also, please label each circle with a small ISO3 label in the centre. Finally, avoid overlaps such as in the legend labels.

iteration 2:

The overall idea is compelling, and the mapped circles also work very well. There are two main problems still to resolve though, both relating to the layout itself. Firstly, the legend circles need to be refined. My suggestion is to leave the 50 tonne legend circle where it is but remove the other two that are currently positioned across the map. Secondly, for the six countries that are called out with actual tonnage values, these callout labels need repositioning so they do not overlap other detail. Position them closer to their country circle while not covering other mapped detail.

Happy Measure Your Feet Day (23/365)

Posted on by

How big are your feet? Go on, measure them. Why? Because it’s National Measure Your Feet Day of course, as if you didn’t already know. Today is dedicated to the observance of foot health and knowing your foot size helps make proper choices about footwear etc.

AI did a pretty good job with the map and the pictorial proportional symbols on this one but struggled with the legend. In the end I had to actually spell out the precise labels to include which seems to be the only good way to get it to not write gobbledegook. I also had to emphasise the importance of not positioning the legend across any of the landmasses. The first iteration had it covering much of South America. Once it had corrected the legend it covered more of the landmass!

A map showing average adult foot size

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Please create a world map showing average male and female foot size by country. The data should be shown using proportional symbols where each proportional symbol is the shape of a footprint. data for male average footprint size will be shown as the left footprint, with female average footprint size shown as the right footprint, giving a pair of footprints per country. Include a legend that indicates the different sizes of footprint. The title should read “Global Footprints”

Then, an iteration to fix the legend:

Please edit the legend labels. There should be three pairs of feet. Under the largest pair should be three lines of text that read “Large”, “Male 11+”, “Female 9+”. Under the medium sized pair of footprints should read “Medium”, “9-10.5”, “7-8.5”. Under the smallest pair should read “Small”, “<9”, “<7”. Please also ensure the legend doesn’t overlap the map.

Then, to fix the overlaps:

That’s an improvement but I really need to impress people with this so I cannot have the legend overlap any landmass. Can you fix it please? I suggest moving the legend to a central position where the gap on the layout is largest.