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Get started with cartokit

This step-by-step tutorial will help you get started with cartokit, a direct manipulation programming environment for building web maps.

With cartokit, you can analyze, visualize, and style vector geospatial data using familiar interactions from design tools like Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Felt, and Mapbox Studio. Simultaneously, cartokit generates a Mapbox GL JS program to reproduce the map exactly. Take the code to your text editor or computational notebook for further customization or deployment.

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Your first map

For this tutorial, we’ll recreate a choropleth map from D3’s example gallery visualizing the unemployment rate by county in the United States.

A choropleth map of unemployment rate by county in the United States, built using D3.

Choropleth maps are one of the most common forms of thematic mapping in newsrooms today, used to visualize everything from election results to gun violence to carbon footprints. With choropleth maps, areas are shaded in proportion to the value of a variable (e.g., unemployment rate) being represented.

As you’ll see in this tutorial, cartokit makes creating choropleth maps a breeze.