Which Map Projection Should You Use? Equal Earth vs Mercator vs Robinson (and 4 more)

August 19, 2026

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 seven available in Oh My Maps!, what each one gives up, and when to reach for it.

The short answer

Use Equal Earth. It is the default for a reason: it keeps every country’s area proportionally correct, 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.

Equal Earth — the default

Preserves: area, exactly. Distorts: shape, increasingly toward the poles and the edges.

Equal Earth is a modern (2018) equal-area pseudocylindrical projection designed specifically to look good while being area-honest. Its predecessor in that role, Gall–Peters, is also area-correct and is famously unpleasant to look at — continents come out stretched into vertical smears. Equal Earth was built to fix exactly that.

Use it for anything where a country’s ink stands for a quantity: choropleth maps, travel maps, “countries where we operate”, coverage maps, teaching maps. If you are shading countries by a number, area distortion is not a cosmetic problem — it silently reweights your data.

Natural Earth — the pretty compromise

Preserves: nothing exactly. Distorts: everything a little.

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 general-purpose reference maps, illustrations, covers and decorative backgrounds — anything where the map is a picture of the world rather than an argument about it.

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.

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.

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.

Equirectangular — the grid one

Preserves: nothing except the property that latitude and longitude map to a plain rectangular grid. Distorts: area and shape, growing with latitude.

Also called plate carrée. One degree of latitude and one degree of longitude are the same distance on the page everywhere, which makes it the standard format for raster geodata and for texture maps wrapped onto a 3D globe.

Use it when the coordinate grid is the point: teaching latitude and longitude, producing a texture for a globe, or aligning with a dataset already stored that way.

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.

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

Switching is free

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 Equal Earth, then click through the others before exporting. It takes fifteen 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.

Related reading: How to make a custom world map online and How to create a choropleth map from spreadsheet data.