Last week, I posted a map of the United States with international flag backgrounds for each state corresponding to a similarly populated country.

This week, I’ve gone ahead and created a new map, this time with the backgrounds corresponding to the closest sized country in the world. I didn’t prevent duplicates, so if two states are close in size (see South Dakota and Nebraska), they will likely have the same country flag, which produces some interesting results.

I mostly re-used the same code, with one important change. I updated the code that scales flag images to be an appropriate size for each state. The new solution is much more general, and I think produces better looking images.

As usual, feel free to poke around the code, examine the map, and point out how I can improve it.