How to use Map Maker

Everything the editor can do, in the order you will meet it. The short version: pick a color, click countries, download. The long version follows.

Color your first map

Pick a paint from the palette at the bottom, then click or tap regions to color them. Click again with the same paint to clear it. With a mouse you can drag across several regions to color them in one sweep; on a phone, dragging moves the map and tapping colors. Undo and redo live next to the palette, and the eraser clears any region, arrow, shape, or text it touches, including drag-erasing on touch.

More colors and shading patterns

The chevron button in the palette opens a bigger picker above the color row: forty colors from light to dark, a grayscale row, and a shading row with diagonal stripes, horizontal stripes, dots, and crosshatch. Shading combines with any color, so solid red and striped red can mean different things on the same map (election maps use stripes for toss-up states). The color picker next to it chooses any custom color. Two useful details: picking a palette color keeps your current shading, and clicking a legend row's swatch restores that exact fill, shading included.

The legend

Every fill you use gets a legend row automatically, with a count of how many regions carry it. Type labels straight into the rows and give the legend a title. The x on a row removes that fill from the whole map; the Legend button in the toolbar hides the legend on screen and in downloads.

Shade the map from data (choropleth)

Open Data in the toolbar and paste two spreadsheet columns: a region and a number per line. Commas, semicolons, and tabs all work, so pasting straight from Excel or Google Sheets is fine. Regions match by name (spelling variants like Czechia or Czech Republic both work), by ISO code, and on the US map by state name, postal code, or FIPS code. A header row is detected automatically and its value column becomes the legend title. Choose equal counts or equal ranges, three to nine classes, and a color ramp, then Color the map: every matched region is shaded from low to high with a numeric legend. Rows that did not match are listed so you can fix them, the dialog remembers your data per map, and a single undo reverts the whole thing.

Map style and region names

The Style panel sets the sea, land, border, and name label colors, four border widths, and the name labels themselves: show them on the map, pick Small, Medium, or Large, and a Clean, Serif, or Mono font. Turn on Move name labels to drag any label; it becomes a normal text you can edit. Style choices are saved per map and apply to downloads exactly as on screen.

Text, arrows, and shapes

Text places labels: click the map, type, drag to move, and use the small bar to resize, recolor, or delete. Shapes holds arrows, lines, ellipses, and rectangles; drag on the map to draw one. Select any of them later to move, resize, or rotate it, and drag the circle in the middle of an arrow to bend it into a curve. Picking a paint while a shape or arrow is selected recolors it.

Put a picture inside a country

Image places a picture on the map. Drag it over a country and press Put inside: the picture fills the country, clipped to its borders, which is the classic way to make flag maps. After that you can resize it, rotate it, or take it back out.

Zoom, pan, and crop

Zoom with the mouse wheel, a pinch, or the buttons in the corner. On a phone, drag anywhere with one finger to pan. With a mouse, drag from the sea, hold Space, or drag with the right button from anywhere. Crop marks a frame (square, 4:3, 16:9, vertical, or your current view) and the download contains exactly that area.

Download: PNG or SVG

Download saves a PNG, ready for slides, documents, and posts, and it prints cleanly. The menu beside it has SVG, which scales to any size and stays editable in vector apps like Figma or Inkscape, plus full-quality JPG and WebP for sites that ask for those. Download before coloring anything and you have a clean, printable blank map. Anything you make is yours to use, commercially too, with no attribution required.

Saving your work

Maps autosave in your browser, each map separately with its own undo history, so you can work on a world map and a US map at once. Save project (in the download menu) writes a small file you can back up or open on another computer; Open project loads it and switches to the right map if needed.

Share a map as a link

The Share button in the toolbar packs the entire map into a link and copies it. Anyone who opens the link sees your map in the editor, ready to explore or make their own; their previous map stays one undo away. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the link is the data, so sharing keeps the same privacy as everything else here. Pictures placed on the map do not travel in links; everything else does.

Private by design

Nothing you make leaves your device: not your maps, not pasted data. The details are in the Privacy Policy.

The maps

The editor works the same on all of them: the world map, Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Oceania, and the US states.