Map Projections Guide — 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 Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny in response to the Boston Public Schools' 2017 decision to adopt the Gall-Peters projection. The goal was an equal-area projection that avoids the severe elongation of equatorial landmasses and looks similar to the Robinson projection.

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 shows the central hemisphere in the azimuthal equidistant projection and splits the other half into five triangular points that form a star. It was used for world maps in nineteenth-century atlases, and since 1911 a version of it has been part of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) logo.

Presented in 1874 by the German mathematician F. August (with G. Bellermann). It is a conformal projection (preserving angles) that fits the entire sphere inside a two-cusped epicycloid, or nephroid, with no part running off to infinity.

One of the oldest known projections, credited to Marinus of Tyre around AD 100. The French name 'Plate Carrée' translates to 'flat square', as lines of latitude and longitude form a simple square grid.

Known since antiquity: the Egyptians and Greeks probably knew it, and in the 2nd century BC Hipparchus used it to find where stars rise and set. 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); the globe is projected onto a truncated octahedron. 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.

The American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller published a first version, based on a cuboctahedron, in Life magazine in 1943. He produced the final icosahedral version, the Airocean World Map, in 1954 with the cartographer Shoji Sadao. Fuller aimed to show the Earth as "one island in one ocean" (One Island, One Ocean), without splitting any major landmasses (like Asia and North America) and with as little distortion of their relative sizes as possible. 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.

The South African-American geophysicist and oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus was already looking for a way to show the world ocean as a single, continuous body of water in 1942, to make marine currents easier to visualize. He published the square map now known as the Spilhaus projection in 1979, with the help of Robert Hanson and Ervin Schmid of the U.S. National Geodetic Survey. It is an oblique aspect of the conformal Adams World in a Square II projection from 1925, rotated so the cuts run through land and Antarctica sits near the center.

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. Ancient Egyptians may already have used it for star maps, and the earliest surviving description comes from al-Biruni in the 11th century. 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.