Every flat map lies differently.

Designed in 1569 by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator. It became the standard projection for marine navigation because rhumb lines (lines of constant bearing) are represented as straight line segments.

Created in 1963 by Arthur Robinson at the request of Rand McNally. Robinson developed it through trial and error, adjusting coordinates in a table until the world map looked visually balanced and natural to the human eye.

First described by James Gall in 1855, and independently popularized in 1973 by German historian Arno Peters. Peters promoted it as a politically fair alternative to Mercator, correctly portraying the size of Global South countries.

Developed in 1805 by the German mathematician and astronomer Karl Mollweide. It was created to satisfy the need for an equal-area projection showing the entire globe inside an aesthetically pleasing ellipse.

Designed in 1921 by German cartographer Oswald Winkel. The name 'Tripel' (triple) refers to Winkel's goal of minimizing three types of distortion simultaneously: area, direction, and distance.

Created in 2018 by a team of cartographers in response to criticism of the Gall-Peters projection. The objective was to design an equal-area projection that avoids the severe elongation of equatorial landmasses.

Developed in 1879 by the American philosopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce. Utilizing elliptic functions, it projects the sphere onto a square, placing the North Pole at the center and dividing the South Pole into the four corners.

Designed in 1879 by German cartographer Hermann Berghaus. It was initially created as a logo for the cover of Stieler's Handatlas and gained recognition due to its distinctive and artistic star shape.

Designed in 1874 by the German mathematician Franz August. It is a conformal projection (preserving angles) that maps the entire sphere inside a heart-shaped boundary (epicycloid).

One of the oldest known projections, credited to Marinus of Tyre around 120 AD. The French name 'Plate Carrée' translates to 'flat square', as lines of latitude and longitude form a simple square grid.

Known since antiquity, described by Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga in the 3rd century BC. It represents a perspective view of the globe projected onto a plane from an infinite distance (like from outer space).

Created in 1996 by Steve Waterman from the geometry of the Waterman polyhedra (a dense sphere packing). It builds on Bernard J. S. Cahill's earlier 1909 "butterfly map", which unfolded the globe into eight triangular octahedral lobes. Waterman arranged the cuts to run through the oceans and spare the continents.

Developed in 1943 by the famous American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller (with cartographic work finalized by Shoji Sadao in 1954). Fuller aimed to create a map representing the Earth as "one island in one ocean" (One Island, One Ocean), without splitting any major landmasses (like Asia and North America) and without distorting their relative sizes. Unlike most maps, it has no top or bottom, nor a preferred North-up orientation.

Developed and popularized in 1514 by the German parish priest and mathematician Johannes Werner of Nuremberg. Werner refined an earlier design proposed around 1500 by the Viennese humanist Johannes Stabius (Stab). During the 16th and 17th centuries, it was widely used for world maps and maps of Asia, before eventually being replaced by newer, less distorted projections.

Designed in 1942 by the South African-American geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus. Spilhaus aimed to create a map depicting the world ocean as a single, continuous body of water to better visualize marine currents and global water circulation. This projection is an oblique aspect of the Adams World in a Square II projection, rotated and centered on Antarctica.

One of the oldest perspective projections. Points on the sphere are projected from Earth's center onto a tangent plane. Its unique property is that every great-circle arc becomes a straight line.

A family of maps whose meaning depends on the chosen center. The north-polar aspect became the basis of the United Nations emblem, but the same mathematics can place any city or point at the center.

John Paul Goode combined the Sinusoidal projection at lower latitudes with Mollweide at higher latitudes, then divided the map into lobes. The result is an equal-area world map that sacrifices ocean continuity to reduce land distortion.