How to color-code map of the world

Whether you're preparing for a business presentation, crafting educational materials, or creating visualizations for social media, this guide will walk you through the process of creating a color-coded map of the world with Ultimaps Studio.

The resulting map can be exported as a PNG or SVG for use in your presentations and publications, or for creating printable maps. Alternatively, you can share your map by generating a shareable link.

Illustration Maps versus Data-Driven maps

There are two ways of color-coding maps in Ultimaps Studio:

1. Importing a dataset (e.g. Excel or CSV file, Google Spreadsheet or Notion Table) and letting the app do the color-coding for you.
2. Manually choosing the colors for each country you want to highlight.

In this guide, we will walk you through the steps to manually color countries on a map without importing data files. We call this type of map an "Illustration Map." We will cover Data-Driven maps in a separate article.

Creating a Map

First, let’s get started with selecting our base map. In our case, it's a map of the world. Head to https://ultimaps.com/vector-maps/world/world/ and select the Map of the world divided by countries (without Antarctica).

This will take you to Ultimaps Studio where you will be working on your project. On the wizard screen, select "Illustration" and press "Finish Setup".

Coloring the Map

On the left side of the screen, you'll find a list of countries present on your selected map. Select each country you wish to color. In the example below, we will be coloring G7 countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.

1. For each country, click on Fill and pick your desired color.
2. Colors at the top of the color picker are shared across your document and can be configured in the "Theme" panel located on the right.

That's it - your map is ready.

Additional Customizations

To change the default appearance of the countries, access the Theme panel on the right. Here, you can modify the fill color and border style of the countries. Note that the default fill of the country will only be applied to those countries that you haven’t colored yourself (in our case, if we change the default fill, it will apply to every country except the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan).

In the example below, I changed the boundary colors to dark blue, making the land boundaries a bit brighter than the country boundaries.

Navigate to the Layers tab to adjust the background settings for both the canvas and the map layer.

Enhance the Visualization

Utilize available tools in the toolbar to add rectangles, lines, or text to your map according to your needs, providing an additional layer of information to your visualization. These elements (as well as the map layer) can be moved, resized as styled as needed.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can create a personalized color-coded map of the world (and other geographical areas) in Ultimaps Studio, perfect for your specific needs. Happy mapping!