It's day 11 of the 30 Day Map Challenge and today's topic is "Minimal Map"
Challenge yourself to use the fewest possible elements (color, line weight, labels) while keeping the map clear, useful, and informative.
For today's report I've downloaded the boundaries of the National Parks of the UK from the Office for National Statistic's Open Geography Portal. As this map needs to use a few elements as possible, I thought I'd show Icon Map Slicer's background map customisation options, polygon pattern fill options and text labels.
In terms of the background map, I've chosen the "Toner" style of background map, and then turned off all the labels, transportation, boundaries, building, land use and POI layers.
I also customised the colours of the land and water resulting in the following clean background map:
For the National Park polygons, I downloaded the GeoJSON format of the file, and imported the geoJSON file to the Power BI data model using Power Query's JSON import. This means I had the name and code of each park, to drive filtering and conditional formatting.
I then added the file as a geojson (from file) layer and linked it to the Power BI data using the Feature Reference field.
For the colours, I added an additional field in the data containing the RGB hex colour code - alternatively I could have set up a conditional formatting rule.
Rather than using a solid colour for the fill, I've chosen a pattern background. Icon Map Slicer offers the ability to use either an external image URL for the pattern, or you can choose from the built in pattern library:
You can also use these conditionally, by added a column to the Power BI dataset containing the pattern name and using the "fx" button to assign it the the "Pattern / Image URL" field:
Finally for the text labels, I enabled Icon Map Slicer's data labels option and assigned the "Name" field using the "fx" button. I set the font size to be larger when the map is zoomed in, and added some padding.
Here's the resulting Power BI report:
And the .pbix file to download.