Creating a truly beautiful and customized map can be a frustrating experience, requiring either expensive software or deep coding knowledge. Enter PaintMyMap, a new online custom map maker that lets anyone - from educators to professionals - design, style, and export custom maps in minutes, and all for free.
What is PaintMyMap?
PaintMyMap is an intuitive web-based editor designed to simplify the map creation process. It strips away the complexity of traditional GIS tools, offering a clean interface focused on styling and customization.
The platform provides a variety of base maps, including world, continent, and country outlines. The real power, however, lies in its ability to handle user-uploaded data. You can easily drag and drop your own geographic data files - including common formats like GeoJSON, TopoJSON, Shapefiles, KML, and CSV - right into the editor.
Once your data or base map is loaded, the customization begins. You can "paint" regions with different colors, add labels, and use a draggable legend to clearly present your information. For those who need specific cartographic standards, the tool also offers a selection of popular projections like Mercator, Robinson, and Winkel Tripel.
It literally took me less than 5 minutes to create the map at the top of this post. That time included downloading U.S. state boundaries as a GeoJSON file, uploading the data into PaintMyMap, editing the map legend, color-coding each state, and exporting the final graphic as a PNG file.
