The Projection Lab
Every map projection is a mathematical compromise between area, conformal angle, distance, and direction. Explore 14 landmark projections with real-time Tissot indicatrix deformation metrics.
Mercator Projection (1569)
Inventor: Gerardus Mercator · Family: Cylindrical
One round Earth.
Mercator
Gall–Peters
"When co-opted into classrooms and wall atlases, Mercator visually inflates imperial powers in North America and Europe while drastically shrinking the African continent, South America, and the equatorial belt."
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Mercator Projection
Engineered strictly as a marine navigation tool, Mercator stretches latitude intervals toward the poles at the exact rate needed to preserve loxodromes (rhumb lines) as straight lines. This produces monumental area inflation in polar latitudes.
Gall-Peters Projection
Championed by Arno Peters in the 1970s as a politically just corrective to Mercator, Gall-Peters preserves absolute surface area proportions across the globe at the cost of extreme shape shearing at the poles and vertical elongation at the equator.
Robinson Projection
Commissioned by the Rand McNally publishing company, Robinson created an empirical lookup table of coordinates designed to minimize both shape and area distortion across the global oceans and continents simultaneously.
Winkel Tripel Projection
Tripel ('triple') refers to Winkel's objective to simultaneously minimize three distortions: area, direction, and distance. Adopted by National Geographic in 1998 to replace Robinson.
Dymaxion Projection (Fuller)
Projected onto the 20 triangular facets of an icosahedron and unfolded flat with no standard 'North-Up' orientation, Fuller's Dymaxion map presents the Earth's continents as an almost contiguous landmass with minimal local shape or area distortion.
Peirce Quincuncial Projection
Invented by the American pragmatist philosopher and mathematician C.S. Peirce, this projection maps the globe onto a square where the North Pole is at the center and the South Pole is divided among the four corners, forming a tessellatable quincunx.
Goode Homolosine Projection
Goode combined the Sinusoidal projection (between 40°44'N and 40°44'S) with the Mollweide projection for higher latitudes, interrupting the ocean basins to allow each major continental landmass to be centered on its own local meridian.
Mollweide Projection
Published in Leipzig as an improvement on Mercator for astronomical and global geographic distributions, Mollweide represents the entire spherical world within an exact 2:1 ellipse.
Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC)
Lambert’s mathematical tour de force projects the sphere onto a cone intersecting the globe at two standard parallels. Meridians are straight lines converging at the pole; parallels are concentric circular arcs.
Albers Equal-Area Conic
Using two standard parallels where scale is exact, Albers Equal-Area Conic preserves true proportional surface area across large east-west landmasses like the contiguous United States, Europe, and China.
Azimuthal Equidistant Projection
Centered on any chosen point (such as the North Pole in the United Nations emblem or a radio broadcasting antenna), every straight line radiating from the center is a true great circle with exact linear scale.
Orthographic Projection
A perspective azimuthal projection where light rays originate from infinity. It portrays the Earth exactly as it appears from deep space, displaying exactly one hemisphere at a time with foreshortening increasing toward the horizon limb.
Waterman Butterfly Projection
Waterman developed this projection based on packing spheres and unfolding a truncated octahedron (WKS polyhedra). Continents remain remarkably compact and undistorted while displaying ocean connectivity.
AuthaGraph Projection
Created by Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa, AuthaGraph divides the spherical earth into 96 regions, projects them onto an inflated tetrahedron, and unfolds into an approximate equal-area rectangle that can tile infinitely.