> Hexagons have a unique property: they tile a plane without gaps, and each cell maintains a consistent shape and size. This is not a unique feature of hexagon

> Hexagons have a unique property: they tile a plane without gaps, and each cell maintains a consistent shape and size. This is not a unique feature of hexagons; squares do this (and square-tiled cartograms are common, and to the extent any thing in this article is a real trait of hex-tiled cartograms it also is of square-tiled ones) as do triangles (though you need two different orientations with triangles.) > Compared to square grids, hexagonal tiling reduces the “edge effect” where corners in squares can mislead the interpretation of adjacency. This is true if you are drawing a grid over a true map, but when you make a cartogram that reduces irregularly sized and shaped geographic units (counties) to each be represented by any regular polygon, you are going to "mislead the interpretation of adjacency" pretty significantly in any case, so this seems largely irrelevant to the presented use case.