Mind Map Creator

What a mind map is for

A mind map is a diagram that grows outward from a single central idea, branching into related sub-ideas, and then into their sub-ideas. The structure mirrors how thinking actually works — you start with a topic and associate outward — which is why mind maps are so effective for brainstorming, planning, summarising a book or lecture, and breaking a big project into parts. This tool gives you an infinite, pannable canvas where the central topic sits in the middle and every branch you add radiates from its parent, colour-coded so each major branch is easy to follow at a glance.

The fastest way to build one

The whole map can be built without leaving the keyboard for menus. Click a node to select it, then:

• Press Enter to add a child node to the selected node. Keep a node selected and tap Enter repeatedly to fan out several sub-topics quickly.
• Double-click any node (or press Edit Label) to rename it; an input box appears right on the node, and Enter or clicking away commits the text.
• Press Delete or Backspace to remove the selected node. Importantly, deleting a node also removes its entire subtree — every child and grandchild beneath it — so one keystroke prunes a whole branch.

The toolbar mirrors these actions with + Add Child, Delete Node, and Edit Label buttons for when you'd rather click. The central topic is special — it's the root and can't be deleted, only renamed.

How the automatic layout keeps things readable

You don't position nodes by hand unless you want to. When you add a branch, the tool runs a radial layout: the root's direct children are spaced evenly around a full circle, and each child's own children fan out within a wedge pointing away from the centre, at an increasing radius for each level of depth. The practical effect is that branches spread apart instead of overlapping, and the map stays legible as it grows. Each top-level branch inherits one of eight distinct colours, and that colour flows down to all of its descendants and their connecting lines — so the "Marketing" branch and everything under it might be blue, while "Budget" and its children are amber. The connectors themselves are drawn as smooth Bézier curves rather than straight lines, which reads more naturally for an organic, growing structure.

A worked example: planning a product launch

Rename the central node to Product Launch. With it selected, press Enter four times and rename the four new branches Marketing, Engineering, Budget, and Timeline — each picks up its own colour and spaces itself around the centre. Now select Marketing and press Enter to add Email campaign, Social, and Press kit beneath it; they inherit Marketing's colour and fan out on its side of the map. Drag any node to fine-tune its position if the auto-layout isn't quite to your taste — the curved connector follows it. Scroll to zoom in on a dense branch, and click-drag on the empty canvas to pan across the whole map. In a couple of minutes you have a colour-coded, hierarchical overview of the entire launch.

Navigation, saving, and export

The canvas is bigger than the screen. Scroll the wheel to zoom (zooming toward your cursor, so you can dive into detail and pull back out), and drag empty space to pan. Your work is saved automatically to your browser's localStorage after every change, including node positions, zoom, and pan — so closing the tab and returning later restores the map exactly as you left it. Two caveats follow from this: the map is stored only in this browser on this device (it won't sync to your phone), and New Map wipes the saved map to start a blank one, which can't be undone. To keep a permanent copy or share it, use Export PNG, which downloads the current canvas — including the grid and all visible nodes — as an image file.

Tips and common mistakes

• Keep labels short. The node box auto-sizes to its text, so a sentence-long label makes a sprawling box. Use a few keywords and let the structure carry the meaning — that's the point of a mind map.
• Build breadth before depth. Add all the main branches off the centre first, then drill into each. The radial layout looks balanced when the top level is filled out before you go deep.
• Remember deletion is recursive. Before pressing Delete, make sure you really want to lose everything attached below that node — there's no undo.
• Export before clearing. Since "New Map" erases the saved data, download a PNG of anything worth keeping first.
• Frame the view before exporting. The PNG captures the visible canvas, so pan and zoom so the whole map fits on screen before you click Export.