MapChart Press Kit
Product facts, boilerplate copy, and downloadable assets for journalists, bloggers, and partners.
Overview
MapChart is a free, browser-based tool for creating custom, colored maps in seconds, with no design skills or GIS knowledge required. Anyone can pick a map, click countries or regions to color them, build a legend, and download a high-quality image to use in a report, article, video, classroom, or project.
Since launching in 2014, MapChart has grown entirely through word of mouth into one of the most widely used map-making tools online, with maps appearing everywhere from elementary-school classrooms and university research papers to scientific journals like Nature, news articles, YouTube videos, and Reddit. It is used by students, teachers, journalists, researchers, data analysts, strategy gamers, alternate-history enthusiasts, and travelers alike.
MapChart is built and maintained by a single independent developer, Minas Giannekas, a self-taught developer and geography enthusiast from Greece. It began as a personal project (originally submitted for Harvard's CS50 course) and has been shaped over more than a decade by a large, active community that suggests new maps, reports border corrections, and pushes the tool to its limits.
Key Facts
- Product MapChart, a custom map-making web tool and mobile app
- Founder / developer Minas Giannekas (independent, self-funded)
- Based in Greece
- Launched 2014
- Platforms Web (mapchart.net), iOS, and Android
- Reach Around 30,000 people use the website every day; the mobile apps have been downloaded millions of times
- Map templates 80+ maps, from a simple world map to detailed subdivision maps with 40,000+ provinces
- Pricing Free for all maps and core tools. Optional MapChart Plus ($49.99/year) adds saved maps, saved palettes, cross-device access, and an ad-free experience. The mobile apps offer their own Premium options.
- Companion site Historical MapChart for historical maps
- License Maps created with MapChart are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
What You Can Do With MapChart
- Choose from 80+ map templates: world, continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Oceania), individual countries (25+), US states/counties/congressional districts, and first-level subdivisions for countries worldwide.
- Color any country or region with a click, and fill in a legend to explain your color groups.
- Use custom colors, colorblind-friendly palettes, and patterns (dots, stripes, and more) for regions that belong to multiple groups.
- Style everything, including background, borders, legend font, position, and size, then download a high-resolution PNG, JPEG, or SVG for free.
- Create specialized maps: historical maps (1815, 1880, 1914, WWI, WWII, Cold War, and more), video-game maps (Hearts of Iron IV, Victoria 3, Europa Universalis IV), and fantasy maps (Westeros, Tamriel).
- Import data from a spreadsheet on selected maps to visualize datasets quickly.
The Community
MapChart has grown through its users, not marketing. Educators build lessons and visual aids with it, researchers and journalists use it to make data clear, and hobbyists map everything from the countries they have visited to entire fictional worlds. The alternate-history community especially has pushed the tool to its limits, and their appetite for detail is why maps with tens of thousands of provinces now exist.
Using MapChart Maps (Attribution)
Maps created with MapChart are free to use, edit, and publish for both personal and commercial purposes, provided you include a reference to MapChart. Acceptable attribution includes any one of the following:
- Keeping the "Created with mapchart.net" tag embedded in generated maps, or
- A simple link to mapchart.net (the front page or any MapChart page), or
- A text credit on the page or within the article/publication where the map appears (for example, in a caption or the credits).
Maps are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Links
- Website https://www.mapchart.net
- Historical MapChart https://historicalmapchart.net
- iOS app App Store
- Android app Google Play
- Blog https://blog.mapchart.net
- Press contact [email protected]
Assets
Download individual files below, or get everything in one package.
Download all assets (.zip)Logos
Screenshots
Example maps
iOS/Android app screenshots
Device mockups
Boilerplate (Copy-Paste for Articles)
Short version
MapChart is a free online tool that lets anyone create and color custom maps in seconds, then download them as high-quality images. Used worldwide by students, teachers, journalists, researchers, and hobbyists, it has been independently developed since 2014 by Minas Giannekas, a self-taught developer from Greece.
One-liner
MapChart, create and color custom maps in seconds, free.
Questions? Email [email protected].