About this book
Copyright
Color the Counties (or Equivalents) © 2026 by Chris Phan https://chrisphan.com is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Version info
Git commit:e23d451201a0400f2cfe2de53826a67e8879b975 ()
Data source
County data obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau at https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2025/shp/cb_2025_us_county_5m.zip, accessed .
Software used
I have placed the code used to make this book online at https://codeberg.org/christopherphan/color-counties and have made it available under an open-source license. My code uses the following:
- Python, overall programming language https://python.org/
- Click, to improve my the command-line interface https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/
- Jinja, for page templating https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/
- Pyshp, to read Census shapefiles https://github.com/GeospatialPython/pyshp
- Rich, to add some pizzaz to my program's command-line interface https://github.com/textualize/rich
- svg.py, to produce SVG files https://github.com/orsinium-labs/svg.py
I also used these in development:
- Prettier, to lint resulting HTML and CSS https://prettier.io/
- Standard JS, to lint my JavaScript https://standardjs.com/
- pre-commit, to ensure the code is linted and types are checked https://pre-commit.com/
- ruff, to lint my Python code https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/
- ty, to check the types in my Python code https://docs.astral.sh/ty/
- uv, to manage my dependancies https://docs.astral.sh/uv/
Fonts used
- Iosevka Charon Mono, by Juliette Pluto https://github.com/jul-sh/iosevka-charon, which is a modification of Iosevka, by Belleve Invis https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
- Overpass, by Delve Withrington, Dave Bailey, and Thomas Jockin of Delve Fonts https://overpassfont.org
About counties and equivalents
The maps in this book are from U.S. Census shapefiles, and hence display
counties or county equivalents
. County equivalents include:
[1]:
-
the boroughs of Alaska, as well as the census areas of the so-called
Unorganized Borough
- the planning regions of Connecticut
- the District of Columbia
- the parishes of Louisiana
- independent cities (e.g. Baltimore)
- the municipios of Puerto Rico
- the three districts and two unorganized atolls of American Samoa
- Guam
- the municipalities of the Northern Mariana Islands
- the three main islands of the U.S. Virgin Islands
Online version
There is an online version of this book at https://chrisphan.com/color_counties/. On the online version, you can hover your pointer over counties on the maps, or click on them, to highlight them. This might be helpful in coloring counties which are not contiguous.
1 §4.7 of https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/data/tiger/tgrshp2025/TGRSHP2025_TechDoc_Ch4.pdf