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It’s been a big month! Map projections were in the news, and Earthling Maps has reached v2 with a ton of user interface improvements and long-awaited features all in the name of making maps faster, with more clarity, to better add context to stories. More on all of that below.

Note: all maps below were made in Earthling Maps without subsequent edits. Data credits: OpenStreetMap and Natural Earth.

Choosing map projections for accuracy

A map projection is how we flatten and represent our 3D Earth in 2D, and projections have made waves this month! They’re such an important and impactful concept that nearly all UN member states voted in favor of a resolution that encourages the use of equal-area projections for continental views of the world. It specifically calls out the Equal Earth projection as being a preferred choice in order to resolve the classic but highly unfortunate issue of continental size distortion seen in the ubiquitous Mercator projection.

(Wide support for map projections is fundamental to Earthling Maps‘ mission, so you’ll already find the Equal Earth projection available for use when creating global maps.)

The Equal Earth projection, like all equal-area projections, preserves the relative sizes of landmasses. Greenland is sized correctly here relative to Africa:

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical projection, where landmasses appear increasingly larger towards the poles. Greenland is now massively oversized relative to Africa:

Of course, all projections are a tradeoff between certain types of distortions, and uses. The Mercator projection is incredibly useful when paired with a compass due to its preservation of angles and lines–draw a line from port A to port B, point your compass according to the angle formed, and you’re on your way. Mariners have taken advantage of this for hundreds of years.

In recent history, Mercator‘s mathematical properties also lend it to being neatly divided, and subdivided, into square tiles, a convenient and reliable way to store data for maps that might only render a sliver of the world at once. Tiling like this ushered in the dawn of interactive web mapping, where users can zoom anywhere in the world and maps will load quickly because they don’t need to load data for the entire planet.

(Earthling Maps takes this one step further, similarly rendering anywhere in the world, but reprojecting tiles to minimize distortion. More on this below.)

So while Equal Earth vastly improves upon Mercator to better preserve relative areas, landmass shapes distort when closer to the poles and further from the central meridian–Greenland is a bit squashed, and Australia is a bit skewed. But like many projections, Equal Earth can be rotated and be given a different center position:

How would you know if you needed to re-center your map? If any part of the world should have more emphasis and be more legible to readers, put it in the center for less distortion. But no matter the horizontal (longitudinal) center, Greenland still looks a bit squashed. To show it in its true glory, let’s zoom in and use a projection with different advantages:

Projections, quite literally, change how we see and measure the world. They distort the world with mathematically predictable biases, but they‘re biases that influence perception of where people are and the ecosystems they inhabit. That’s why the UN is weighing in, and why being aware of the role of projections in mapping is critical for journalistic ethics and scientific accuracy.

Cartographers will carefully choose from hundreds of possible projections and parameters in order to accurately represent parts of the world, so it‘s something that takes education and experience to get a handle on. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect a non-cartographer to consider all the possibilities, never mind be motivated to do so if they just want a simple map for their newsletter, for example.

Earthling Maps instead bridges the gap, aiming to be a map maker for everyone that doesn‘t cut corners on cartographic fundamentals like projections. We do this by keeping much of what we do with projections under the hood. As you zoom into maps, we automatically calculate reasonable projection choices, accounting for scale, part of the world, and a map’s canvas proportions. This is similar to how the excellent Projection Wizard tool works, but in a unified interface. (Fun fact: Projection Wizard was created by some of the creators of the Equal Earth projection.)

What that means is that a map of Ecuador, for example, will result in a different projection choice than the Greenland map above to best account for distortion:

Meet an Earthling: if you’re in the mapping world, you can hear me talk about this at NACIS 2026 in a talk called "A Locator Map Maker Beyond Web Mercator." Hope to see you there.

Earthling Maps v2

The maps above take advantage of many of the things we‘ve been working on this month to better highlight and contextualize parts of the world. Here’s what’s new:

Area Geographies

CPU fans have been whirring for days crunching all the data needed to support area geographies. That is, geographic boundaries that can be used to frame maps and highlight features. In a New York state of mind? Add the state (or any county within) and further customize.

Let‘s take a look at some before and after exports. Here’s New York State unmasked. There‘s nothing wrong with this, but it can be a busy thing to look at if you just want to highlight what’s in the state:

Compare this to New York State styled with a highlight mask, and then fully isolated:

Note how only the labels within the area geography are kept visible.

To support doing this anywhere in the world, we’re providing data for all 7 continents, 271 countries/territories, 3,919 states/provinces, and 38,908 smaller regions like counties and districts. This data comes from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap (via the excellent Overture Maps Foundation) and is processed in a way to make it easy to add anywhere to your map.

These geographies aren’t just useful for masking like this, but also as a precise way to fit a particular region to your map. Fitting to a geography can be seen here at all levels:

Inset Locators

When you‘re zoomed into an area, will your readers readily understand what part of the world you’re showing?

This is where inset locator maps can help. In your main map, you frame an area of interest, like a part of Dallas, Texas, and a small inset locator map nestled in the corner shows the broader region or world.

Insets are enabled by default, and auto-selected according to scale, but can be hidden and customized in the Inset Map menu.

Labeling updates

Since rolling out leader lines last month, here are more improvements around deciding how to label your map.

Fine-tuning auto-labeling

When you create a map project, whether it‘s city streets or the whole planet, you’re presented with an auto-labeled map as a starting point for additional annotations and callouts, to tailor a map to your story. Your annotations are meant to be the most important things on the map and nothing should get in their way. As such, anything that collides will get out of the way (and you can hide anything you deem unnecessary).

But maps aren‘t one-size-fits-all, and there are plenty of situations where the default auto-labeling isn’t ideal. That’s why there are additional labeling controls so you can fine-tune what appears.

Places: Toggle visibility for entire categories of labels. You can hide all cities, continent names, country names, water labels, and so on.

Language: For places where English isn’t the (only) official language, labels appear with multiple languages. The language toggle determines whether single or multiple languages are displayed.

Density: The idea with auto-labeling is to provide ample context but not clutter the map. With that in mind, maps have a default label density that’s tuned to be balanced. However, there are situations where the default density can feel over- or underwhelming. There are now controls to adjust this.

Labeling streets and rivers

When annotating an area or place in the world, map labels are often drawn horizontally like you‘re reading in this sentence. When labeling streets or rivers, labels follow along the contours of the route. Earthling Maps does its best to auto-label such lines, but there are plenty of situations where it’s critical to have specific street names shown, like the cross-streets of a business. We’re now providing path labeling tools to do just that.

Dark Mode

Personally, I‘m a dark mode user when an app offers it. It feels a little easier on the eyes, and I’m not alone in that preference. So it was high time to add a dark mode to the Earthling Maps editor interface, and it will show up as the default if that‘s your system preference. The maps themselves, however, are unaffected by this, and have their own style settings. They’ll default to light and bright so they’ll stand out.

UI Improvements

With every Earthling Maps release come improvements to the user interface to streamline map production. This update consolidates map editing into a toolbar that’s closer to the map and adds more consistency to the controls.

What’s next?

We’re thinking about improvements to applying styles across multiple features, shaded relief for more terrain context, aerial imagery, and data import. What would you like to see? And have you identified anything while making maps that could be improved to speed up your workflow? Reach out!