Religions in America

We've been learning about "fancy" chart types in our Data Studio class and were tasked with creating one as an assignment. After a friend pointed out that voronoi diagrams resembled stained glass windows, I decided to visualize the religious demographics of the United States in the style of a stained glass window.

I had seen voronoi diagrams before and knew of R packages that could make them. But I needed a voronoi treemap that maps areas within hierarchies, as opposed to a regular voronoi diagram that relies on geographic data. I came across this nifty voronoiTreemap package on R.

I cleaned my data to match the same columns provided in the voronoiTreemap example. I also decided on the hierarchy for my data: Each color group would represent the region where that religion originated and each religion would have its own shade of that color. Religions that contained subgroups, like Catholicism as a subset of Christianity, would all be filled with the same color shade.

Since the voronoiTreemap package asked that the data I input include color, I added in my base colors for each region and the groups of languages in my CSV. After exporting to a HTML widget and saving as a PDF, I then manually colored in the remaining individual languages in Adobe Illustrator.

Next came creating the stained glass effect. I followed Andrei Marius' tutorial, though I did not utilize all the stroke effects because my chart had thinner borders.

And then... a stained glass voronoi treemap was created! A very ✨fancy✨ chart indeed.