These are just simple redesigns of standard-issue census data, but I think they address some important shortcomings of the official maps.

First, data is displayed by tract, not by county. Tracts are scaled so that each contains roughly the same number of people, while counties vary much more widely in population and area. This is especially important for the large counties in southern California, where populations appear to be spread out over the Mojave Desert.

Second, two maps are necessary to understand the diversity of the population: an absolute measure of where people actually live (population density), and a relative measure of the majority or minority status of a population in a certain area (population as percent of total). The Census only tends to publish the latter, which woefully obscures the large minority populations in urban centers.

Of course, these changes still can’t address the problems in the census categories themselves. The Census mixes color metaphors of race with ancestry definitions of race, makes a confusing distinction between "race" and "ethnicity," and lumps more than eighteen million people into a catch-all "other" category.

And yes, I should include Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Stay tuned for version 2.0.

Each image is linked to its home on Wikipedia.