Types of Maps: A Practical Guide for Developers and Analysts

If you have ever opened an atlas, navigated with a phone, looked at an election map, or planned a hike, you have used at least three different types of maps without thinking about it. Cartography has produced a surprisingly large catalogue of map styles, each one optimised for a different question.

This guide walks through the main types of maps in regular use today, explains when each works best, and shows how to produce them with the MapAtlas Maps API.

Two Families: Reference Maps and Thematic Maps

Almost every map falls into one of two families.

A reference map shows many features at once and treats them as roughly equal in importance: roads, rivers, towns, borders, terrain, points of interest. Atlases, road maps, and the default view in any web mapping app are reference maps. They answer the question "what is here?"

A thematic map subordinates the geography to a single dataset and uses colour, shading, or symbols to make the pattern in that dataset legible. Election results by region, rainfall by station, or population density by census tract are all thematic maps. They answer the question "where is this thing concentrated, and what is the pattern?"

Most of what follows fits neatly into one of these two families. A handful of types (web maps, schematic maps, cartograms) bend the categories or sit between them.

Reference Map Types

Political maps

Political maps show borders, capitals, and major cities. The colour palette usually distinguishes countries or administrative units rather than terrain. Political maps are what most people picture when they hear the word "map", because they dominate textbooks, atlases, and news graphics.

Physical maps

Physical maps show natural features: mountains, rivers, lakes, deserts, biomes. Colour ramps usually run from green (lowlands) through brown (highlands) to white (high peaks). They omit or de-emphasise political borders so the natural geography stands out.

Topographic maps

Topographic maps add a precise elevation model on top of physical features, using contour lines that connect points of equal height. Contours bunched tightly indicate steep terrain, contours spread far apart indicate gentle slopes. Hikers, surveyors, and military planners rely on them.

Road maps

Road maps prioritise the road network: highways, secondary roads, junctions, distances. They include towns and orientation features but most other geography is muted. The default style on most web maps is a road map by another name.

Nautical and aeronautical charts

Nautical charts show coastlines, water depth (sounding lines and depth contours), navigational hazards, buoys, and lights. Aeronautical charts show airspace classes, navigational aids, restricted zones, and terrain warnings. Both are reference maps tuned for life-or-death decision making.

Thematic Map Types

Choropleth maps

Choropleth maps fill predefined regions (countries, counties, postcodes) with a colour that encodes a value. They work well for normalised data (rates, percentages, per-capita) and poorly for raw counts, because larger regions look more important simply because of their size.

Dot density maps

Dot density maps scatter one dot for every N occurrences of a phenomenon. The eye reads the cloud of dots as density without needing labels or numbers. They handle raw counts well and avoid the area-bias problem of choropleths.

Proportional symbol maps

Proportional symbol maps place a circle (or other shape) at each location and size it by a value. They are excellent for raw counts at point locations: customers per store, earthquake magnitudes, population per city. The reader compares two cities directly by comparing two circles.

Isarithmic and contour maps

Isarithmic maps draw lines or filled bands of equal value across a continuous surface. Topographic contour lines, weather isotherms, pressure isobars, and elevation models all belong to this family.

Heat maps

Heat maps smooth point data into a continuous coloured surface, typically using a kernel density estimate. They are useful for showing where activity clusters, like crime incidents, customer pickups, or website clicks projected onto a map.

Cartograms

Cartograms distort the size of regions to match a value rather than physical area. A population cartogram might enlarge a small but populous country until it dominates the map. Cartograms are powerful when physical area would mislead the reader, but they take time to read because the geography itself is bent.

Dasymetric maps

Dasymetric maps refine a choropleth by using ancillary data (like land cover) to push the value into the parts of the region where it actually occurs. A population dasymetric map removes value from forests and lakes and concentrates it on residential land, producing a more honest picture than a flat choropleth.

Modern and Specialised Map Types

Web maps and slippy maps

A web map is the interactive, zoomable, draggable map embedded in countless websites and apps. It is rendered from vector or raster tiles served from a tile server. The core innovation is the slippy map: panning loads new tiles seamlessly, zooming swaps to a higher detail level. Almost every product map you see today is a web map.

Schematic maps

Schematic maps deliberately distort geography to clarify topology. The London Underground map is the most famous example: stations and lines are spaced for legibility rather than placed at their true coordinates. Schematic maps work for any network where connections matter more than physical position.

Routing-derived maps: isochrones, isodistances, drive-time areas

An isochrone map shows the area you can reach from a point within a given time, like "everything within a 30-minute drive". They are widely used for site selection, accessibility analysis, and delivery zone planning. The MapAtlas Isochrone API generates these polygons from any starting point.

Real-time and animated maps

Real-time maps overlay live data: vehicle positions, weather radar, flight tracks, transit arrivals. They are technically web maps with a time dimension. Animated thematic maps add a similar time dimension to historical data: an animated choropleth of population over a century, or a heatmap of pickups across a day.

Choosing the Right Type

Start with the question. If the reader wants to know "where is X?", a reference map fits. If they want to understand "where is X concentrated, and what is the pattern?", a thematic map fits. From there:

• Normalised data tied to administrative regions: choropleth
• Raw counts at point locations: proportional symbols
• Raw counts over an area: dot density
• Continuous variable like elevation or temperature: isarithmic
• Activity density from many points: heat map
• Physical area would mislead the message: cartogram
• Network connectivity matters more than position: schematic
• Reachability from a point: isochrone

Then choose a colour scheme deliberately. Sequential schemes for ordered data, diverging schemes for data with a meaningful midpoint, categorical for unordered categories.

Building Any of These with MapAtlas

The MapAtlas Maps API ships vector tiles, raster tiles, and styling tools that cover every type above. For reference maps, start from a base style and adjust the visible layers. For thematic maps, layer your data as GeoJSON and add a fill, circle, or heatmap layer with a data-driven expression.

For coordinate-based work (placing a symbol at an address, computing the centroid of a region), the coordinates lookup tool handles the address-to-lat/lng step. For drive-time and accessibility analysis, the Isochrone API returns ready-to-render polygons.

A map is a tool for thinking. Picking the right type is the first half of the work; the second half is rendering it cleanly enough that the reader can do the thinking themselves.