Map maker
Color Your World Map
A blank world map, up to eight color groups and one click per country. Free sharing, automatic local saving, and travel stats computed from the same open data as every GlobeVS tool.
Start with a template
Four ready-made legends — or start from any of them and rename every group. Your map is saved in this browser as you work.
How this tool works
- Pick a starting template — countries you've visited, a full travel map (lived in / visited / want to go), countries you've lived in, or a travel wishlist. Each template loads a ready-made legend; every group's label and color is editable, and you can keep up to eight groups.
- Color countries your way: click them on the map, find them by name in the search box (the Chinese version also matches Chinese names), or paste a whole list. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, jump to a continent, and undo or redo your recent steps.
- Share the result: the copy-link button builds a URL that contains your entire map, the stats card tallies countries, land share, continents and your farthest pair, and PNG / SVG / .json exports render the map with its title, legend and data credit.
What people use it for
- A travel map of the countries you've visited — the classic “scratch map”, but free, digital and shareable as a link.
- Clean vector maps for slides, reports and blog posts — the SVG export drops into any document and scales without blurring.
- Classroom geography: hand out a blank map, let students color regions or mark a route, and compare the live stats.
Data & method
The map covers all 176 country-level features of the Natural Earth dataset — every one colorable, from the largest (Russia) to the smallest (Vatican City), Antarctica included.
The blank world map is the same open dataset every GlobeVS tool renders: Natural Earth 1:110m country boundaries (public domain) — 176 country-level features, Antarctica included, rendered as a plain SVG in the equirectangular (plate carrée) projection, so exported maps carry no Mercator distortion. The live stats card uses the same equal-area spherical formula as the true-size tool for the land share, and the farthest-pair figure is the great-circle distance between the two colored countries' centroids. The Chinese version overlays Simplified-Chinese country names from mledoze/countries (ODbL) over the same geometry — never machine-invented — and falls back to the sourced Natural Earth name when no Chinese name exists. The editor itself is a JavaScript enhancement — without it you can still read the guide, the data note and the FAQ on this page, and the start panel above explains exactly how a map is made.
Embed this tool
Add the map editor to your own site: paste the snippet below into your HTML and the full color-a-country editor loads inside an iframe, with a small non-removable “Powered by” attribution link back to this page. The embed is available in English.
<iframe src="https://globevs.com/embed/map-coloring" width="800" height="600" title="World Map Coloring — GlobeVS" loading="lazy" style="border:0;max-width:100%" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups"></iframe>FAQ
Is it free? Do I need an account?
Completely free, and there is no account, no sign-up and no server-side storage. Your map is stored two ways: a share link carries the entire map inside the URL itself, and your working draft plus any named maps you save live in your own browser's localStorage. Nothing you color ever leaves your device unless you copy a link or export a file yourself.
Can I use the exported map in my blog or presentation?
Yes. The underlying boundaries are Natural Earth (public domain), so the exported PNG and SVG are free to use; we ask that you keep the attribution line the export renders (“Natural Earth (public domain)”) as good practice. Exports from the Chinese version render Chinese country names from mledoze/countries, which is ODbL-licensed — keep the “中文国名 mledoze (ODbL)” credit line those exports carry.
How are the travel stats computed?
The land share is the colored countries' surface area divided by the total land area of all countries in the dataset, both computed with the same equal-area spherical formula (Chamberlin–Duquette) from the boundaries — not eyeballed off the map projection. The continent count is the number of distinct continents among your colored countries. The farthest pair is the greatest great-circle distance between any two colored countries' centroids, so it is a country-to-country figure measured between geographic centers, not capitals.
Do share links expire?
No — there is no backend that could expire. A share link is the tool's own address plus your map encoded in the URL, so it works for as long as the page exists. It is also robust to dataset updates: assignments are stored as country-name slugs (not positions in a list), and if the dataset ever renames or drops a country, an old link simply skips that one country instead of shifting the meaning of every other color.
How is this different from other map-making tools?
Three things. Sharing and saving are free, not paywalled — the share link and the auto-saved draft are the whole product, with no account wall. It is bilingual: the interface, country names, exports and stats exist in English and Simplified Chinese over the same 176-country dataset. And the stats card is built in: countries colored, share of world land, continents touched and your farthest pair, each linked to the underlying comparison tools.