The World Flag Map

World Flags is a CartoDB map in which the shape of every country had been overlaid with the country's flag. This patchwork effect appears to have been made by creating a polygon for each country and then filling the polygon with the correct flag image.

The flag polygons are themselves overlaid on top of Stamen's Watercolor map tiles.


Last year the Van Gogh Map also used images for land areas on a world map. This map was created with Mapbox GL (it therefore needs a WebGL enabled browser to view) and uses a different technique to fill in the land areas on the map.

Feature types on this map, such as water and different types of land cover, are made up of map tiles created with textures taken from Van Gogh paintings. The result is a map style which you probably wouldn't want to use very often but is a neat demo of how easy it is to create interesting map styles with Mapbox GL.