Hexagonal Binning is another way to manage the problem of having to many points that start to overlap. Hexagonal binning plots density, rather than points. Points are binned into gridded hexagons and distribution (the number of points per hexagon) is displayed using either the color or the area of the hexagons.This technique was first described in 1987 (D.B.Carr et al. Scatterplot Matrix Techniques for large N, Journal of the American Statistical Association, No.389 pp 424-436).

There are many reasons for using hexagons instead of squares for binning a 2D surface as a plane. The most evident is that hexagons are more similar to circle than square. This translates in more efficient data aggregation around the bin center. This can be seen by looking at some particular properties of hexagons and, especially, of the hexagonal tessellation.