How to change the design of your locator map

This is part of a five-part series on how to create locator maps:

1 – Introduction: How to create a locator map
2 – Move around the map and set the map size
3 – Add markers
4 – Design the map
5 – Annotate and give your map a key

To create a locator map, go to datawrapper.de and click on "New Map" and then "Locator map." This will open the locator map creation pipeline. Four steps will lead you to your final map: 1: Add markers, 2: Design map, 3: Annotate and 4: Publish. In this article, we will focus on step 2: Design map.

Make important map elements visible with map styles

In step 2 of the map creation process, we first have the option to choose between four map styles. By default, our markers are on the Light map style:

Different map styles bring attention to different elements on the map. To choose the best map style for your markers, just play around. The Light and the Gray map style work well in cities, the Earth style works well if you want to highlight green areas, and the Maritime style is great if you want to draw the attention to water areas.

Below the map style, you can decide which map elements should be visible on your map. By default, the following map elements are visible: labels, buildings, roads, urban areas, green areas (like parks and forest), country borders, and water (like rivers and lakes).

But maps have different requirements: Maybe inner borders are important to your map, or glaciers. To create a map that shows only and exactly the elements you require, play around with the map styles and turn on and off certain elements.

Choose a globe projection for less distortion

At the bottom of the Map styles section, you find the option to show a Globe projection.

Why is this useful? The standard Mercator projection flattens out the earth, which allows it to squeeze lots of countries into one view. But to achieve that, the shape of the countries has to be a bit distorted. In some cases — particularly near the poles — this distortion can really affect the shape of your map. You can find an example here.

With the globe projection, you can create:

• Maps of countries and other large regions that accurately show their relative sizes

• Maps of global routes, like flights and shipping lanes

• Maps of the North or South Poles

Help readers orient themselves on the map with map extras

Below the map style, you can find the panel for map extras. Here you have the option to display a scale bar, a north arrow, a highlighted region, or an inset map. Click on the toggle bar to the left of each map extra to turn it on or off:

The scale bar (or bar scale) is a black bar labeled with the represented length in kilometers or miles, and is displayed at the bottom left corner of the map. You can choose if the unit of this scale bar should be kilometers or miles.

The north arrow helps your map audience understand, well, where north is. You probably only need it if you've rotated your map. The north arrow is automatically shown when the map is rotated more than 40 degrees.

Sometimes it's useful to highlight a region in a map, for instance, to emphasize that your map or the story it is included in is mainly talking about that one area. You can select any country, state, or city outline using the drop-down menu. If you do, an area marker with that region will appear in your marker list (in step 1: Add markers), where you can change its style or delete it. Highlighted regions appear below the map elements.

Inset maps show the larger geographic context of your map. If you zoomed into a street corner, you can show which part of the city it is in. Choose between a globe and a region (e.g. a country or a city outline), or upload your own inset map. You can also give it a Label, decide where the inset map is positioned on your map (Position), how big it should be (Size), and how much it should move away from the edge of the map (Offset).

You're almost done! Now it's time to add a title and description to your map and maybe give further information about your markers with a key. We will cover this in an extra tutorial that you can find here.