Don’t always believe what other maps have taught you – the portrayal of the world in map-form has often been distorted and misrepresented over the centuries.

Our most common atlases still distort the relative size of countries, so German software and graphics designer Kai Krause drew up a real map of Africa to set the record straight. Here then is the actual landmass of Africa as compared to some of the globe’s major countries from other continents.

As Krause says: “Africa is so mind-numbingly immense that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met. It contains the entirety of the US, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well – all combined!”

Krause’s aim was to make “a small contribution in the fight against rampant Immappancy”, in particular the fact that most people do not realise how much the most commonly used method of mapping the world – the Mercator Projection – distorts the relative sizes of countries.

For more information, visit Kai’s website.