Which Map Projection Should You Use? Natural Earth vs Equal Earth vs Mercator (and 3 more)

Every flat world map is wrong. The Earth’s surface cannot be laid out on a plane without stretching something, so a projection is a choice about which error you are willing to live with: area, shape, distance, or direction. You can preserve some. You can never preserve all.

That makes “which projection should I use?” a question with an actual answer, once you know what the map is for. Here are the six available in Oh My Maps!, what each one gives up, and when to reach for it.

The same coloured world map on the Natural Earth projection, a compromise layout with rounded corners and near-accurate country areas

The short answer

Use Natural Earth. It is the default for a reason: no compromise projection here is more honest about area without asking you to trade away shape or fill a strict rectangle, which is the property that matters for almost every map where countries are coloured by something. Switch away only when you have a specific reason, and the sections below are the specific reasons.

Natural Earth: the default, and the general answer

Preserves: nothing exactly, but area and shape both stay close everywhere. Distorts: everything a little, worst near the poles.

Natural Earth is a compromise projection: it was designed by eye to look right rather than to satisfy a mathematical constraint. Areas are close but not exact, shapes are plausible everywhere, and the rounded corners read as a globe unrolled rather than a rectangle.

Use it for choropleth maps, travel maps, “countries where we operate”, coverage maps, teaching maps, and general-purpose reference maps: anything where the map needs to be roughly honest about size without becoming an argument about a specific number.

Robinson: the classic compromise

Preserves: nothing exactly. Distorts: area moderately, shape mildly.

Robinson is the compromise projection you have seen your whole life. National Geographic used it for their world maps from 1988 to 1998, and it became the default look of “a world map” for a generation. It is very close to Natural Earth in intent; the differences are in the curvature of the meridians and the treatment of high latitudes.

Use it when you want a familiar, institutional look: textbooks, reports, newspaper graphics. It is a reasonable choice for a choropleth if you accept mild area error in exchange for that familiarity.

Equal Earth: exact area, and the one the UN named

Preserves: area, exactly. Distorts: shape and angle, worst at the edges.

Equal Earth is an equal-area projection published in 2018. Any two regions with the same area on the globe get the same area on the map, everywhere, with no approximation. Africa comes out fourteen times the size of Greenland because it is.

What makes it worth having alongside Natural Earth is that it manages this without looking strange. It was designed to echo Robinson’s familiar outline, with rounded edges and pole lines, which is exactly what older equal-area maps like Gall-Peters failed at.

In September 2026 the UN General Assembly named this projection in a resolution recommending equal-area maps for education, media and digital platforms.

Use it when a reader will compare the shaded area of one country against another: population, land use, emissions, anything per unit of ground, and any teaching map. Use Natural Earth instead when the map is categorical and no size claim is being made.

The same coloured world map on the Equal Earth projection, with rounded edges and pole lines, where every country covers its true relative area

Miller: rectangular, minus the worst of Mercator

Preserves: nothing exactly. Distorts: area substantially at high latitudes, though far less than Mercator.

Miller is a cylindrical projection: meridians are straight vertical lines, so the map fills a rectangle edge to edge. It is essentially Mercator’s stretching turned down. The poles are finite, so Antarctica is drawn normally and the map has a top and a bottom.

Use it when the map has to fill a rectangular space with no wasted margins: a slide background, a banner, a printed page where the map is the whole layout. Do not use it for area comparisons.

Mercator: for bearings, and almost nothing else

Preserves: angles and local shape (it is conformal); a straight line is a constant compass bearing. Distorts: area, catastrophically, toward the poles.

Mercator exists to solve one problem, and it solves it perfectly: on a Mercator chart, a straight line is a rhumb line, a course of constant bearing. That is why it has been the navigator’s projection since 1569 and why web map tiles use a variant of it.

For a thematic world map it is close to the worst choice available. Greenland appears roughly the size of Africa (Africa is about 14 times larger). Russia, Canada and Scandinavia dominate the frame. Any map coloured by a per-country value inherits that bias directly.

The same world map on the Mercator projection, where Canada, Russia and Scandinavia are hugely inflated toward the poles and Antarctica is dropped — The same map on Mercator. Note how the far north balloons compared with the Natural Earth version above.

Antarctica is excluded on Mercator here, and that is not a bug. The projection diverges at ±90°: the poles are at infinite distance, so a landmass that reaches the pole cannot be drawn. Every Mercator world map deals with this somehow, usually by cropping around ±85°.

Use Mercator for navigation, for anything that must line up with web map tiles, or when you specifically want to make a point about Mercator.

Orthographic: the globe

Preserves: the honest impression of a sphere. Distorts: everything toward the limb, and hides half the world.

Orthographic is the view of Earth from infinitely far away: what a globe looks like in a photograph. You can rotate it by dragging, so you can put any region in the centre.

The same coloured map on the orthographic globe projection, rotated to face the Atlantic so the Americas, Africa and Europe curve across a sphere while the far side is hidden

Use it when one hemisphere is the story: a regional map that should not pretend to be global, a launch covering the Americas, travel concentrated in Asia, a title slide. Do not use it for global comparison: half your countries are simply not visible, and the ones near the edge are compressed into slivers.

Quick reference

Projection	Area	Shape	Best for
Natural Earth	near-exact	good	choropleths, travel maps, anything shaded
Robinson	near-exact	good	textbooks, reports, familiar look
Equal Earth	exact	fair at edges	area comparisons, teaching, per-area data
Miller	poor at poles	fair	rectangular layouts, banners
Mercator	very poor	exact, local	navigation, web tiles
Orthographic	limb-distorted	good centre	one hemisphere, title art

Switching is free

The Projection section of the sidebar with Natural Earth selected, beside the coloured world map

Changing projection in the editor re-renders the same map: your colours, labels, legend and data all survive the switch. So the practical advice is: build the map in Natural Earth, then click through the others before exporting. It takes ten seconds and it is the fastest way to see how much of your map’s impression was coming from the frame rather than from your data.

See the difference. Paint a few countries, then cycle through all six projections: the same map, six arguments.

Open the editor