The Six Minute Map

The new European Union Map - Minus the United Kingdom

For my breakfast this morning I decided to make a 6 minute map. I like to share, so you can find the recipe for my map below.

At the end of this month the UK will leave the European Union. This means that there is likely to be a lot of demand for new maps of the European Union sans the UK.By following my recipe for the Six Minute Map you can create your own new map of the European Union, as it will look from January 1st 2021.

Ingredients:

• geojson.xyz
• geojson.io
• Mapstarter

Step 1. Preparation 

First we need to prepare the data. For this map we need polygons for the 27 European Union countries. You can get open source country data from geojson.xyz. geojson.xyz is a great resource which provides public domain Natural Earth map data in web-friendly sizes.

In geojson.xyx select the "admin 0 countries" data set. On the right you can find a link which will automatically open the selected countries of the world map data in geojson.io.

Step 2. Cooking Your Data

geojson.io is an online geojson editor. Using geojson.io you can select and delete individual countries from the 'admin 0 countries' data. We just need the 27 European Union countries - so go ahead and delete all the other countries on your map - leaving just the 27 EU countries. When that is complete save the remaining countries as a new GeoJSON file.

Step 3. Serve

Open Mapstarter and click on the "Drag a shapefile, GeoJSON, or TopoJSON file here, or click to select one" button. Now upload the data you saved in geojson.io. Now you can download your data either as a SVG, PNG or Code. If you download the data as code you can create an interactive map of your new European Union map. For this post I downloaded the PNG image file of the map (which is shown at the top of this post).

Disclaimer:  Like all good chefs I cheated in creating my map. I actually skipped step 1 and step 2 as described above. Deleting 200 odd country polygons from the Natural Earth data for countries of the world will probably take more than six minutes. For my map I instead downloaded the European Union Countries GeoJSON data from Open Datasoft. I then used this data in Mapstarter to create my map. By doing this I actually created a map of the new European Union in less than 2 minutes.