Geographical Maps in ggplot2: Rectangle World Map

Maarten Lambrechts posted a tutorial where he demonstrates the steps through which he created a Eurovision Song Festival map in R.

Inspired by his tutorial, I decided to create a worldmap of my own, the R code for which you may find below.

options(stringsAsFactors = F) # options
library(tidyverse) # packages

# retrieve data file
link = "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/maartenzam/787498bbc07ae06b637447dbd430ea0a/raw/9a9dafafb44d8990f85243a9c7ca349acd3a0d07/worldtilegrid.csv"

geodata <- read.csv(link) %>% as.tibble() # load in geodata
str(geodata) # examine geodata

## Classes 'tbl_df', 'tbl' and 'data.frame':    192 obs. of  11 variables:
##  $ name           : chr  "Afghanistan" "Albania" "Algeria" "Angola" ...
##  $ alpha.2        : chr  "AF" "AL" "DZ" "AO" ...
##  $ alpha.3        : chr  "AFG" "ALB" "DZA" "AGO" ...
##  $ country.code   : int  4 8 12 24 10 28 32 51 36 40 ...
##  $ iso_3166.2     : chr  "ISO 3166-2:AF" "ISO 3166-2:AL" "ISO 3166-2:DZ" "ISO 3166-2:AO" ...
##  $ region         : chr  "Asia" "Europe" "Africa" "Africa" ...
##  $ sub.region     : chr  "Southern Asia" "Southern Europe" "Northern Africa" "Middle Africa" ...
##  $ region.code    : int  142 150 2 2 NA 19 19 142 9 150 ...
##  $ sub.region.code: int  34 39 15 17 NA 29 5 145 53 155 ...
##  $ x              : int  22 15 13 13 15 7 6 20 24 15 ...
##  $ y              : int  8 9 11 17 23 4 14 6 19 6 ...

# create worldmap
worldmap <- ggplot(geodata)

# add rectangle grid + labels
worldmap + 
  geom_rect(aes(xmin = x, ymin = y, 
                xmax = x + 1, ymax = y + 1)) +
  geom_text(aes(x = x, y = y, 
                label = alpha.3))

# improve geoms
worldmap + 
  geom_rect(aes(xmin = x, ymin = y, 
                xmax = x + 1, ymax = y + 1,
                fill = region)) +
  geom_text(aes(x = x, y = y, 
                label = alpha.3),
            size = 2, 
            nudge_x = 0.5, nudge_y = -0.5,
            vjust = 0.5, hjust = 0.5) +
  scale_y_reverse()

# finalize plot look
colors = c('yellow', 'red', 'white', 'pink', 'green', 'orange')
worldmap + 
  geom_rect(aes(xmin = x, ymin = y, 
                xmax = x + 1, ymax = y + 1,
                fill = region)) +
  geom_text(aes(x = x, y = y, 
                label = alpha.3),
            size = 3,
            nudge_x = 0.5, nudge_y = -0.5,
            vjust = 0.5, hjust = 0.5) +
  scale_y_reverse() +
  scale_fill_manual(values = colors) +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(ncol = 2), col = F) +
  theme(plot.background = element_rect(fill = "blue"),
        panel.grid = element_blank(),
        panel.background = element_blank(),
        legend.background = element_blank(),
        legend.position = c(0, 0),
        legend.justification = c(0, 0),
        legend.title = element_text(colour = "white"),
        legend.text = element_text(colour = "white"),
        legend.key = element_blank(),
        legend.key.size = unit(0.06, "npc"),
        axis.text = element_blank(), 
        axis.title = element_blank(),
        axis.ticks = element_blank(),
        text = element_text(colour = "white", size = 16)
        ) +
  labs(title = "ggplot2: Worldmap",
       fill = "Region", 
       caption = "paulvanderlaken.com")