Credits and data sources

1. The map data, and what we changed

Every map file on this site is a derivative. The boundary data was simplified, which drops points until a file fits a size budget, reprojected into a flat drawing frame, cropped, and in places renamed or merged so region names read the way people say them. A handful of very small regions were dropped because they are smaller than a pixel at country scale.

None of this was checked or approved by the organizations named below, and none of them endorse this site. If you need boundaries accurate to the source, go to the source. If you need a boundary to mean something politically or legally, these files are the wrong tool.

What is here is chosen as well as collected. A boundary set only goes on this site if its license permits commercial use, including the advertising that pays for the site; if the credit it asks for can be given here, on one page, rather than on the picture; and if nothing in it follows an exported image out of the door. Sets that failed any of those three, however good the map was, were deleted rather than switched off, and so were sets whose license could not be traced back to the people who surveyed the ground. That is checked rather than remembered: every row in the table below carries the class of license it rests on, and a build of this site fails outright if one of them names a license that would put a notice, a share-alike term or a non-commercial limit on your picture.

The files themselves are public. Each set is served at a plain address of the form /geo/{set}.json, and anyone can fetch one without an account. That is a convenience rather than a license condition: no set on this site carries a share-alike term, so nothing here obliges us to pass a license on with a file, and nothing obliges you to pass one on with an image.

2. Country district maps

Each of the 30 country-scale sets below names its own source and license in its row. The earliest of them were retrieved through geoBoundaries, the open global boundary database run by the geoLab at William and Mary; the sets added from August 2026 onwards were read directly from the register or publisher named in their row. The gbOpen collection is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and asks to be cited. Where a country's own source is stricter than CC BY 4.0 we follow the stricter one.

We check each country's own source as well as the collection license, because the two can differ, and we drop a country rather than ship one whose national source would follow your picture out of the door.

Runfola, D., Anderson, A., Baier, H., Crittenden, M., Dowker, E., Fuhrig, S., Goodman, S., Grimsley, G., Layko, R., Melville, G., Mulder, M., Oberman, R., Panganiban, J., Peck, A., Seitz, L., Shea, S., Slevin, H., Youngerman, R., Hobbs, L. (2020). geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231866. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231866. geoBoundaries is at geoboundaries.org.

3. United States

Works of the US federal government carry no copyright, so nothing in this section is legally required and the credit is ours to give. The Census Bureau does not endorse this site.

4. World, continents and subdivisions

The world map, the country subdivisions, the high-resolution country outlines and the rivers, lakes, places and graticule overlays are all Natural Earth, which is public domain. Natural Earth asks for nothing: in their words, no permission is needed and crediting the authors is unnecessary. We credit them anyway, because a reader deserves to know where a boundary came from.

The election maps in this table are not Natural Earth, and their credits are conditions rather than courtesies: the United Kingdom constituencies come from the Office for National Statistics, the Canadian ridings from Elections Canada and the Australian divisions from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Each row below names its own source, license and vintage, and every one of those licenses is satisfied by naming the source here rather than on a map.

5. Specialist and drawn sets

The sets that are not administrative boundaries: the solar system, the layers of the Earth, an animal cell, a hex board and an invented world. Every one of them was drawn or generated for these editors rather than taken from anybody else, so there is no third-party license in any of them at all. Where one of them used Natural Earth to settle a fact, such as which hexagons are land, its row says so.

6. Tier list template pictures

A few tier-list landing pages open with pictures already in the unranked pool: country flags, US state flags, presidents, national parks, planets, fruit and vegetables. Those files live under /seed/tierlist/ and are product-owned starters, not community uploads. They were chosen because the license lets us host them on a commercial site and does not follow an exported ranking out of the door. Name-only boards (NFL, NBA, Premier League, fast food) have no pictures to credit: the names are facts, and the marks stay with their owners. The official soda and candy templates are published templates with their own credit files, not starters.

Each image pack ships a LICENSE.txt next to the files. The table below is the same information in one place. Mississippi's 2020 New Magnolia flag is included as the current state flag; Commons tags it "Copyrighted free use" rather than public domain, which is why it is called out instead of folded into a PD row.

7. What travels with an image you export

Nothing. An image you export is a different thing from the data behind it, and no source on this page attaches a condition to it. You can publish a map you made here, put it in a video, print it on a shirt, or sell it, without adding a credit line, a license notice or a link, and without passing any license on to whoever you give it to.

That is a rule we hold ourselves to when choosing data, not a lucky accident. A boundary set whose license would put a mark on your picture does not go on this site, however good the map is, and the sets that were here under those licenses were taken off rather than left to stamp a notice into everybody's exports. Every license on this page accepts a link to one page listing all the sources, which is this page: it is in the footer of every page of the site, and in the map editor, under Layers.

The only mark on a map you export from here is ours, the site address in small type in one corner, and what you may do with that is in section 11 of the terms of service. The one thing none of this covers is material you brought yourself, such as an image you dropped onto a map, which stays under whatever rights it already carried.

8. Fonts

The chart editors ship 36 typeface families and serve their font files from this domain, so the licenses travel with them. 34 of them are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows a font to be bundled and redistributed with any software as long as each copy carries the copyright notice and the license, and the other two are under the Apache License 2.0. No font is sold here, on its own or bundled, which the Open Font License forbids. Nothing in this site's terms of service overrides the license on a font file.

Neither license asks for anything on the artwork. Drawing text with a font does not put the font's license on the picture, and no credit for a typeface is owed in a map you export, which is why none is drawn into one. What that means for a file you export depends on the format. A PNG or a JPEG is pixels: the text has been drawn and there is no font in the file, so nothing follows it. An SVG or a PDF is different, because both of them embed the actual font software for the faces your chart uses, and that software stays under the license named below however far the file travels. So each of those two files says so inside itself, wherever it really does carry font software: an SVG that embeds a face opens with a comment naming the families it carries and pointing back here, and a PDF drawn as vector art carries the same statement in its document properties. A PDF written as a picture embeds no font and says nothing, because nothing is owed. If you redistribute one of the files that does carry a face, or pull a font out of it, the license below is the one you are working under, not this site's terms.

SIL Open Font License 1.1

• Abril Fatface, Copyright (c) 2011 TypeTogether, with Reserved Font Name Abril
• Anton, Copyright 2020 The Anton Project Authors
• Bangers, Copyright 2010 The Bangers Project Authors
• Bebas Neue, Copyright 2019 The Bebas Neue Project Authors
• Bungee, Copyright 2023 The Bungee Project Authors
• Caveat, Copyright 2014 The Caveat Project Authors
• Comic Neue, Copyright 2014 The Comic Neue Project Authors
• Dancing Script, Copyright 2016 The Dancing Script Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name Dancing Script
• EB Garamond, Copyright 2017 The EB Garamond Project Authors
• Fira Code, Copyright 2014-2020 The Fira Code Project Authors
• Fira Sans, Copyright (c) 2012-2015 The Mozilla Foundation and Telefonica S.A.
• Hanken Grotesk, Copyright 2021 The Hanken Grotesk Project Authors
• IBM Plex Sans, Copyright 2019 IBM Corp.
• Libre Baskerville, Copyright 2012 The Libre Baskerville Project Authors
• Lora, Copyright 2011 The Lora Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name Lora
• Merriweather, Copyright 2024 The Merriweather Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name Merriweather
• Montserrat, Copyright 2011 The Montserrat Project Authors
• Nunito, Copyright 2014 The Nunito Project Authors
• Open Sans, Copyright 2020 The Open Sans Project Authors
• Oswald, Copyright 2016 The Oswald Project Authors
• Pacifico, Copyright 2018 The Pacifico Project Authors
• Patrick Hand, Copyright (c) 2010-2012 Patrick Wagesreiter
• Playfair Display, Copyright 2017 The Playfair Display Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name Playfair Display
• Poppins, Copyright 2020 The Poppins Project Authors
• PT Sans, Copyright (c) 2009 ParaType Ltd.
• PT Serif, Copyright (c) 2010 ParaType Ltd.
• Raleway, Copyright 2010 The Raleway Project Authors, with Reserved Font Name Raleway
• Righteous, Copyright (c) 2011 Brian J. Bonislawsky DBA Astigmatic, with Reserved Font Name Righteous
• Roboto, Copyright 2011 The Roboto Project Authors
• Roboto Mono, Copyright 2015 The Roboto Mono Project Authors
• Source Sans 3, Copyright 2010-2021 Adobe, with Reserved Font Name Source
• Space Mono, Copyright 2016 The Space Mono Project Authors
• Baloo 2, Copyright 2019 The Baloo 2 Project Authors (Ek Type)
• JetBrains Mono, Copyright 2020 The JetBrains Mono Project Authors

Apache License 2.0

• Permanent Marker, Copyright (c) 2010 Font Diner, Inc.
• Satisfy, Copyright (c) 2011 Font Diner, Inc.

9. Software

None of these require a credit on the page. They are here because they do visible work and it costs nothing to say so.

• d3-geo, Copyright Mike Bostock, ISC license. Every map projection on this site is d3-geo.
• topojson-client, Copyright Mike Bostock, ISC license.
• React, Copyright Meta Platforms, Inc. and affiliates, MIT license.
• Next.js, Copyright Vercel, Inc., MIT license.
• Tailwind CSS, Copyright Tailwind Labs, Inc., MIT license.
• html-to-image, MIT license. This is what turns a chart into the PNG you download.
• jsPDF, Copyright James Hall and yWorks GmbH, MIT license. This writes the PDF, and embeds the fonts in it.
• svg2pdf.js, Copyright yWorks GmbH, MIT license. This turns a chart's vector shapes into the vector shapes on the PDF page.

The rest of what the site runs on is MIT or Apache 2.0, and the full list with versions is the dependencies block of the project's package.json.

10. Corrections

If a credit here is wrong, incomplete, or names you when it should name someone else, tell us and we will change it. That includes a rights holder who wants a set removed rather than credited differently. Mail [email protected] or use the contact page. Copyright complaints about a published chart go through the copyright pageinstead, which is a different process with a designated agent.