Map2Maps: how big is your country, really?

One of my longest-running projects is Map2Maps, a web app that answers a question the standard world map is surprisingly bad at: how big is a country, really?

The map most of us grew up with stretches everything near the poles and shrinks everything near the equator. Greenland looks the size of Africa. It is not: Africa is about fourteen times larger. Map2Maps lets you grab a country's shape and drag it anywhere else on the globe, so you can see its true size against another place instead of trusting a distorted projection.

Why I built it

I originally built Map2Maps back in 2020 because I kept getting into the same argument: people wildly misjudge how large countries actually are, because the map lies to them. Japan feels small and tidy; drag it across Europe and it stretches from the North Sea to Italy.

The idea is simple and a little addictive: pick a country, move it onto another region, and watch your intuition get corrected in real time.

What it does

• Compare country sizes by dragging one country's true outline onto any other location
• Draw your own shapes and polygons directly on the map to compare arbitrary areas
• Save and share custom maps so you can send a comparison to someone else

It is the kind of tool that starts as a quick "huh, interesting" and turns into ten minutes of dragging countries around the map.

A ground-up rebuild

The version online today is the second incarnation of the project.

• v1 (2020) was built with Angular and LeafletJS. It worked, but it was showing its age.
• v2 (2023) was a complete rebuild on a modern stack: Next.js and TypeScript, with Mapbox GL JS for the map rendering, a PostgreSQL database for saved maps and accounts, and payments handled through Paddle.

The rebuild was not just cosmetic. Moving to Mapbox GL made the dragging and reprojection far smoother, and the new backend made saving and sharing maps a first-class feature rather than an afterthought.

On the AI question

I have been open on this blog about building recent projects with heavy AI assistance, so I want to be accurate here too: Map2Maps is not one of those. The core of it was designed and hand-built across several years, well before I leaned on AI tools the way I do now.

Where AI has helped more recently is around the edges: cleanup passes, refactors, and smaller feature work on the v2 codebase. It's a hand-built project with some AI help bolted on late in its life, a different story from my recent apps and games, and worth keeping separate rather than lumping it all together.

Try it

Map2Maps is free to use in the browser:

• map2maps.com

Go drag your own country somewhere unexpected. It is hard to unsee how wrong the standard map has been all along.