All Streets by Ben Fry

Perhaps Fry’s most well-known work and a standout work of data visualization, All Streets is a compelling visual representation of every road in the lower 48 states of the United States, totaling over 26 million individual road segments. The work demonstrates the power of code to convey detail and texture with line that is also based on reality. Created initially as example code for a student in 2006, this project vividly illustrates the nation’s infrastructure without the use of traditional geographic features such as state outlines. The roads themselves form an emergent map, highlighting population densities and natural barriers like mountains. The work appeared as an example in Fry’s 2007 book Visualizing Data. The work, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line files, achieves visualization through Processing, which Fry co-created with Casey Reas.