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Illinois County Map Maker

A blank Illinois county map to print, and a builder to fill it with your own data. Download the free outline of all 102 counties, or upload a spreadsheet and publish an interactive Illinois map you can embed anywhere.

Fond de carte Illinois vierge, à télécharger gratuitement

Les 102 counties, en tracé net. Imprimez-le, coloriez-le ou insérez-le dans un document — sans compte et sans attribution.

Fond de carte vierge de Illinois montrant l'ensemble de ses counties

Libre pour tout usage, y compris commercial et scolaire. Généré à partir des mêmes contours que l'éditeur.

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Ce que montre une carte Illinois

Illinois divides into 102 counties, and it is one of the most lopsided county maps in the country. Cook County occupies a small rectangle in the northeast corner and holds roughly two out of every five people in the state; add the five collar counties around it and you have somewhere near two-thirds of Illinois inside about four per cent of its area. The other ninety-six counties run south for four hundred miles through corn, coal and river towns, and they are drawn at a size that reflects the nineteenth-century idea of a day's ride to the courthouse rather than anything about who lives there now. Every honest Illinois county map has to deal with that imbalance, and most of the design decisions on this page come back to it.

Trois façons de dessiner Illinois

Colorez les régions pour un taux, dimensionnez un marqueur pour un effectif. Inverser les deux est la façon la plus courante de tromper le lecteur.

Choroplèthe

Colorer chaque région

L'intensité de la couleur porte la valeur. Le bon choix pour les taux, les parts et les données par habitant, déjà ajustés à la taille ou à la population.

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Symboles

Un marqueur dimensionné par région

Un symbole par région, mis à l'échelle selon la valeur. À utiliser pour les effectifs et les totaux, là où colorer la surface ne ferait que redessiner la carte de la population.

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Bulles

Cercles proportionnels

Des cercles dimensionnés par la valeur, posés sur le tracé. Efficace quand quelques régions dominent et que les petites disparaîtraient dans un aplat.

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Quand cartographier Illinois

  • Your data is reported by Illinois county

    IDPH health indicators, IDES labour and wage figures, Illinois State Board of Education report-card data, USDA crop statistics and State Board of Elections returns are all published by county.

  • You are showing a rate or a share

    Unemployment rate, uninsured share, share of households with broadband, share of the vote, median household income. Rates are already adjusted for population, which is what shading a region needs.

  • You want to show Chicagoland against downstate

    It is the single most common comparison made about this state, and a county map is the only way to make it without asserting where the line falls — the reader sees Cook and the collar counties and draws it themselves.

  • You need a blank map to print or fill in

    Classroom exercises, county fair and extension materials, planning workshops, colour-by-hand sessions. The free outline above prints cleanly at any size.

Quand éviter la carte Illinois

  • You are mapping totals rather than rates

    Shade Illinois by a raw count and you have drawn Cook County. Nothing else on the map can compete with it, and the other 101 shapes collapse into a single pale band. Use symbols or bubbles sized by the count instead.

  • Your story is inside Cook County

    Chicago's neighbourhoods, wards and community areas all live inside one shape here. A county map cannot show anything that varies within the city, which is most of what people want to say about Chicago.

  • The comparison crosses a state line

    Madison and St. Clair belong to the St. Louis metro; Lake and McHenry blend into southern Wisconsin. If that is the point, use the US county map so the reader can see past the border.

  • Only a few counties have data

    Southern Illinois counties are small in population, and suppressed cells are common in health releases. A map with seventy grey shapes and thirty coloured ones is a worse bar chart — rank the counties you do have.

Comment créer une carte Illinois

Du tableur à la carte publiée, étape par étape.

01

Download the blank map, or start from the template

The free outline above is a plain SVG of all 102 counties — print it, or drop it into a document. To build with data, open the PlotSet Illinois (counties) template, which comes with sample data already bound.

02

Prepare a county column and a value column

One row per county: the county name or its five-digit FIPS code in the first column, your number in the second. FIPS codes for Illinois all begin 17.

03

Upload or connect your data

Import a CSV or Excel file, paste from a spreadsheet, or connect a Google Sheet so the map can be refreshed when the source updates.

04

Pick the style that fits the measure

Shade the counties for a rate, or switch to symbols or bubbles for a count. Same geography, same data, different encoding.

05

Choose a colour scale on purpose

Sequential for a low-to-high measure, diverging only when a real midpoint exists — the state average, zero change, a 50 per cent line. Four to six steps read more precisely than a smooth gradient.

06

Publish, embed or export

Publish for a live interactive map with a tooltip on every county, or export a PNG, SVG or PDF for a report or a deck.

Partez du modèle Illinois avec ses données d'exemple, puis remplacez-les par les vôtres.

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Faire correspondre vos données Illinois

À quoi doit ressembler la colonne des lieux, et où trouver des données déjà compatibles.

All 102 counties, spelled as the state spells them

The joins that fail are the run-together and apostrophe-free names: DuPage, DeKalb, DeWitt, LaSalle and Jo Daviess appear in datasets as "Du Page", "De Kalb", "De Witt", "La Salle" and "JoDaviess" about as often as not. St. Clair carries a full stop. Kankakee, Sangamon, Winnebago and Menard are routinely mistyped.

Illinois FIPS codes start at 17

17001 is Adams, 17031 is Cook, 17203 is Woodford. Store the column as text so the codes keep their shape, and remember the county part is odd-numbered rather than sequential.

There are two Lake Counties on the same border

Illinois has a Lake County north of Chicago and Indiana has one immediately to its southeast; they touch. Any dataset joined on name alone will hand one's rows to the other, and the two are close enough on the map that the error is easy to miss.

"Downstate" is not a geographic direction

In Illinois usage it means everywhere outside Chicagoland, including Rockford and Galena, which are north of Chicago. If your dataset carries a downstate flag, check what it actually contains before mapping it as a region.

Where to get Illinois county data

IDPH, the Illinois Department of Employment Security, the Illinois State Board of Education, the State Board of Elections and the Census Bureau's ACS all publish county tables. The University of Illinois Extension is the usual source for agricultural series.

Erreurs fréquentes sur une carte Illinois

Shading counts instead of rates

On this state it is the most damaging version of the mistake anywhere in the country: one county with two out of five residents will take the darkest class and flatten everything else to nothing.

Letting the map hide two-thirds of the population

The collar counties are small shapes carrying enormous numbers, and the southern counties are large shapes carrying very few. Shading by area silently argues the opposite of the demography — say so in the caption, or pair the map with a sorted bar chart.

Missing Putnam and the small northern counties

Putnam is the smallest county in the state by area and disappears at web sizes. If one of the small shapes carries the story, label it directly or add an inset.

Suppressed data drawn as zero

Health and education releases blank out small counts for privacy. Import those cells as empty rather than as 0, or the sparsest counties will read as the healthiest ones on the map.

Using a rainbow colour scale

A sequence of hues has no natural order, so readers cannot tell high from low without checking the legend on every county. Use one hue, light to dark.

Questions sur la carte Illinois

Yes. The outline above is a free SVG of all 102 Illinois counties — right-click to save it, print it, or drop it into a worksheet or document. No account needed.

Placez vos données sur la carte Illinois

Importez un tableur et publiez une carte interactive en quelques minutes — gratuit, sans carte bancaire.