The challenge for mapmakers is to stretch the round Earth’s surface onto flat paper.

All solutions to this challenge have in common that they cause distortion, because the skin of a round ball simply will never lie flat.

Opposite you can see selected examples.

Such representations are called gridded map projections or shortened gridded maps in Cartography .

On the websites NETS on net you learn more about (mathematical) Cartography and you have the possibility to create a whole string of gridded maps with the programm GridMaps (see Software).