Maps of the Week

There is some beautiful map making and some beautiful looking maps in Roads to Rome. For this impressive project Moovel Lab took 486,713 starting points across the whole of Europe and then worked out the quickest route from each of those points to the eternal city of Rome.

They then created an interactive map showing all the routes, with the the most used streets shown larger on the map. The result is a very pretty map (which you can even purchase as a poster).

Roads to Rome also includes an 'Explore' section which lets you create a similar map centered on your own location, Just enter an address and a travelling time and Roads to Rome will create a similar beautiful looking map, highlighting all the roads leading to your home.


The Racial Dot Map of Brazil is a Google Map showing the racial distribution of the Brazilian population. Each dot on the map represents one person. There are over 190 million dots on the map, with each dot colored to show the person's race.

The location and racial status of the dots on the map comes from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics census 2010. The smallest geographical unit of the census is the census sector and each of the dots are randomly distributed within each census sector.


Back in the day a large map of the world adorned nearly every classroom wall.

Jonah Adkins has recreated the style of one of these classroom maps with his Back 2 School interactive map. The Back 2 School map style is based on an old map of North America that Jonah found in Charlottesville. The map uses elevation data from ETOPO, which is shaded on the map to recreate the topographical style of the original map.

The map itself was styled in Mapbox Studio. You can view more interesting map styles created with Mapbox Studio in Mapbox's new Mapbox Studio Gallery.


Solar Impulse is a plane attempting to fly around the world powered purely by the sun's energy. Flying on the Wings of Twitter is a mapped visualization of Tweets from around the world sent in support of Solar Impulse.

Flying on the Wings of Twitter uses CartoDB's Torque library to show an animated timeline of Tweets being posted around the world in support of the flight. A lot of Torque powered Twitter maps are little more than flashing dots on a map. Flying on the Wings of Twitter however moves a little beyond this by actually sending the Tweets into flight themselves.

As you progress in the timeline the Tweets actually fly from their origins to the location of Solar Impulse at the point the Tweets were sent. If you quickly move through the timeline the flight path of the Solar Impulse is revealed on the map as all the Tweets descend upon the plane.