We are in many ways blessed to live in a world big enough that we need maps to remember everything. The downside is that we need maps to get around or just visualize information. And like any medium, it can be done well or very, very poorly.
So if you want to feel lost from behind your screen, we’ve gathered some of the best posts from a group dedicated to sharing the worst maps folks have ever seen. Get comfortable as you prepare to furrow your brow in confusion, upvote your favorites and be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section down below.
#1 Did You Know, You Can Drive For 74 Hours In Germany And Still Be In Germany?
Image source: Immediate_Wallaby107
#2 World Map According To Fish
Image source: Pinkplatabys
#3 Not Sure If Terribly Accurate Or Just Terrible
Image source: LadySpud
A map is really just an answer to a question, and the question is usually some version of how to get from here to there without losing your sanity. The best maps know exactly which question they are answering and politely ignore everything else. The worst ones try to answer every question at once, or better yet, a question nobody asked. That one idea separates a map you can use from a map you can only hang in the hallway as a conversation piece.
The London Underground map is a masterclass in knowing what to leave out. Before the 1930s the network was drawn over real London geography, which meant tangled curves and cramped central stations.
#4 Americans Visit Europe Like
Image source: Jacob-Anders
#5 Proposal To Place Chile Between Canada And USA
Image source: jamexfot
#6 What’s Wrong With Poland?
Image source: KaleidoscopeFast7871
Then a draftsman named Harry Beck, who spent his days sketching electrical circuit diagrams, decided to treat the whole system like a circuit board. His version showed how stations connect rather than how far apart they really are, and the London Transport Museum notes that a 2006 national contest ranked it the second favorite British design of the twentieth century. It is not flawless, since plenty of people have hopped on a train between two stations that are a short stroll apart because the map made the gap look huge. Still, for deciding which line to take and where to change, it is very hard to beat.
#7 Map Of European Countries Playing Football
Image source: EngroveGMD
#8 Does Your Country Lie Mostly North Or South Of The Equator?
Image source: CinemaslaveJoe
#9 Did You Know?
Image source: EngroveGMD
Then come the humble extras that separate a real map from a doodle. A legend explains the symbols, because a tiny blue triangle could be a campsite, a lighthouse, or a sandwich shop. A scale tells you whether that squiggle is a ten minute stroll or a three day expedition. A north arrow stops you from marching confidently the wrong way. A date matters too, since a map showing a bridge that vanished decades ago is less a guide and more a ghost story. And a title helps, because a map that never says what it shows is just expensive wallpaper.
#10 Merch Shipping In Pangea
Image source: GossipBottom
#11 Seems Legit
Image source: StMungo-ofCincinnati
#12 I Love My Country
Image source: dhevxxx
Every flat map of a round planet has to bend the truth somewhere. The famous Mercator projection is a gift to sailors because a straight line on it matches a steady compass heading. The price is that it stretches places near the poles and shrinks places near the equator, so Greenland looks almost as big as Africa, even though Africa is roughly fourteen times larger.
#13 They Didn’t Need To Make The Legend This Honest
Image source: HelicopterEmpty7393
#14 Railway Map Of Antarctica
Image source: honeybeesuke
#15 Sri Lankan Map Of The USA
Image source: SingularSeal
You can drag countries around and watch them change size on The True Size Of, which is a lovely way to lose an afternoon. A projection is not good or bad by itself. It is only good or bad for a job, and a map built for ships is the wrong tool for settling arguments about which country is biggest.
#16 Us States With At Least 3 Trees
Image source: DiggyPT_69
#17 Chances Of Being Born In Each Continent
Image source: PositionExpensive575
#18 What If The Economies Of Albania And China Were Combined?
Image source: Sharrysama
A map with the right information can still flop if nobody can read it. Colors that are too similar, labels piled up like passengers on a rush hour train, and text so tiny it needs a magnifying glass all make a map miserable. So does using red and green as the only difference between two things, which leaves some readers guessing. Good design is mostly contrast and breathing room, so the eye knows where to land first.
#19 America Explained
Image source: RattusCallidus
#20 How I See Europe As A Color Blind Person
Image source: Many_Ad_7536
#21 Map Of Europe But Its Color Depends On A Coin Toss
Image source: akkstatistician
Sometimes a map is not for finding your way at all but for finding an answer. During a cholera outbreak in Soho in 1854, physician John Snow marked the cases on a street map, and the lethal cases clustered around one water pump on Broad Street. The London Museum explains how Snow used it to persuade local authorities to remove the pump handle. The map worked because it showed two things clearly, the lethal cases and the pumps, and let everything else sit quietly in the background.
#22 Mind Blown
Image source: CinemaslaveJoe
#23 Took Me A Second To Realize What I Was Actually Looking At
Image source: Mundane-Temporary426
#24 Countries That Existed 300 Trillion Years Ago
Image source: Moist-Complaint-7578
#25 America’s Worst Fear
Image source: pillowman011
#26 An Abomination Quite Frankly
Image source: Aggressive-Pea-4495
#27 The Pacific Ocean Is So Vast It Could Hold 16 Polands
Image source: Equivalent-Style-260
Then there is the opposite approach, which is packing in a huge amount and somehow pulling it off. In 1869 the French engineer Charles Minard drew Napoleon’s disastrous march into Russia as a single image, with a band that thins as soldiers are lost and a temperature line for the freezing retreat. Big Think’s Strange Maps column points out that it unites six different sets of data, and it still reads easily because every piece serves one story. Crowding is fine as long as the crowd has a job.
#28 Shampoo Usage Across Europe
Image source: Orginal_Copy_WS
#29 How Europeans See The Map
Image source: Jeremy0207
#30 How I See USA As An European
Image source: Super-Tonight-7106
So a useful map answers a clear question, leaves out what does not matter, labels what remains, admits its limits, and never makes the reader squint. Keep that in mind as you scroll, because the maps ahead miss nearly all of it, and a few of them seem to be doing it on purpose.
#31 My Try To Draw The World By Memory
Image source: Tasty_Throat2082
#32 Countries That I Colored Red
Image source: Interesting-Bass9957
#33 How I See Europe As A Deaf Person
Image source: LetRevolutionary271
#34 Europe If Red Never Existed
Image source: Sea_Bobcat695
#35 If You Put The Us & Canada Over Europe, A Lot Of People Would Lose Their Lives
Image source: EngroveGMD
#36 England’s Worst County – End Results
Image source: TheEnlight
#37 Indeed Terrible
Image source: GossipBottom
#38 I Think This Qualifies As A Terrible Map
Image source: ciityofstars_
#39 Country Where A Girl Who Rejected Me Today Is From
Image source: AlePiga
#40 If We Could Just Raise Sea Levels By 150 Meters We Get A Backup Strait Of Hormuz
Image source: Immediate_Wallaby107
#41 Seems Legit
Image source: PizzaToastieGuy
#42 How Americans See Europe
Image source: nocalniko
#43 You Can Sail From Georgia To Georgia In A Perfectly Straight Line
Image source: Over-Professor6495
#44 How I See Europe As A Non-European
Image source: Certain-Appeal-6277
#45 Un Votes To Illegalize Child Marriage
Image source: Veritas-Cuervo
#46 This Is How I See Europe As A Myanmarese Immigrant Living In Sudan
Image source: Embarrassed_Seat_609
#47 Countries That Don’t Recognize North Korea
Image source: NoobieHatPlayz
#48 Europe But I Translated Every Country Name 50 Times
Image source: mario_kart_player
#49 Map Of European Countries Based On How Gay They Are
Image source: strangetoaster167
#50 What???
Image source: Ollieboy458
#51 Remove The Worse Half Of The Map – Round 9
Image source: Auditored
#52 Does Your Country Have Over 8000000000 People?
Image source: Past_Round6702
#53 If The UK Was Next To Japan
Image source: NorVideo_1
#54 Worst Country In The Americas – Results
Image source: THMeijer
#55 Remove The Worse Half Of The Map – Round 5
Image source: Auditored
#56 Countries
Image source: Glittering_Truck_655
#57 South America Can Fit All These Countries Inside Itself
Image source: Tepp1s
#58 Saw On Twitter:whites:it Depends:not White
Image source: PepegaNaMBatChest
#59 Terrible Map In A Coffee Shop In Amman, Jordan
Image source: bensgroi
#60 I Dunno If This Has Been Posted Here Yet
Image source: kakay2u
#61 How I See Mars As A Plutonian Immigrant
Image source: aquisoueu
#62 Travelling To The USA, What State Should I Go To?
Image source: DiggyPT_69
#63 Remove The Worse Half Of The Map – Round 12
Image source: Auditored
#64 For The Rest Of Your Life You Can Only Eat Food From One Of These Regions. Which Do You Choose?
Image source: Rusiano
Follow Us
