Design Google Maps – Frontend System Design
We’ll walk through the frontend system design for the Google Maps web client: a map of the whole planet that pans at 60fps, zooms from continents to doorsteps, keeps street labels readable while you rotate it, and shows search results, place details, and driving routes on top. You’ll see how the Web Mercator projection turns the planet into a pyramid of square tiles, why modern maps ship vector tiles and draw them with WebGL, how a tile pipeline fetches, cancels, and decodes in workers, and how labels and thousands of markers stay legible.
This is not the Figma question, even though both use tiles. Figma tiles a design canvas that users edit. A map tiles read-only geographic data that someone else produced, so the hard parts move to projection math, network scheduling, label collision, and point density. It is also not Uber, where the interesting part is live driver tracking on top of a map you take for granted. Here, the map is the product.
