Cartography Guide To Map Design Part 1

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Table of Contents
Introduction

How to use this guide

How vector maps work

Best practices: Map design

Design elements

Color

Typography

Iconography

Texture

Design principles

Contrast

Hierarchy

Density

Legibility

Special considerations

Maps for mobile

Maps for navigation

Maps for data visualization

Getting started with Mapbox maps

Mapbox-provided tilesets

Mapbox Streets

Mapbox Terrain

Mapbox Traffic

Mapbox-provided map styles

Basic/Bright

Streets

Outdoors

Dark/Light

Satellite/Satellite Streets

About the Author

Introduction

The Guide to Map Design
Cartography is a design and data synthesis that balances information, color, readability,
and accuracy. The essentials of good visual communication are key to making a map
that guides while encouraging visual exploration and quick comprehension.
Modern mapping tools and technologies allow product owners to architect elegant,
considered mapping experiences for their products and end users. Tools like Mapbox Studio
and Mapbox GL JS, give product owners control not only over the look and feel of their
maps, but also over the map's responsiveness to user inputs, environments,
and other factors.

Why design custom maps?
As you navigate the world it’s important to know where you are in relationship to where you
are going. It’s also important to understand context along the way—what will you find on the
way from here to there? Designing a custom map for your brand or product allows you to:
Keep users visually connected to your brand and in your app as they use the map.
Highlight or downplay information as necessary to your map's use case.
Design a basemap for your data and product narrative to build interactions upon.
Integrate user inputs and environments into their experience with your brand
in real-time.

How to use this guide

How to use this guide
Designing a custom map style for your product or brand starts with context and
intention. Begin your journey by answering, "How will this map design reinforce the
information and experience my brand or product aims to convey?"
This guide will lead you through the process of defining and designing your custom map
style. It will:
Explain how vector maps work
Illustrate some best practices in map design, such as:
Customizable design elements: color, typography, texture, and iconography
Principles of good map design: visual contrast, hierarchy, density, and legibility
Special considerations for design maps for navigation, mobile, and data visualization
Get you started with Mapbox maps
Define the global coverage and zoom levels provided with web maps
Describe Mapbox-provided map styles and when to use them
Describe Mapbox-provided vector tiles (data) and what it covers

Let's get started!

How vector maps work

How vector maps work
Before designing a single road, waterway, or city label, it’s important to understand how
vector maps function.
Vector maps are an advanced approach to mapping where map data is delivered and
precisely rendered in real-time. They are delivered to the browser or mobile device using
WebGL or OpenGL which dynamically draws data with the speed and smoothness of a
video game. The result fast interactive maps.
Since the map is literally being drawn in browser or device, you can dynamically change
styled elements during runtime. Lighten or darken the map based on the time of day,
personalize icons and the colors based on user activity, switch languages on the fly, or
bump label sizes based on user preferences to improve legibility, all in real time.
A vector maps consist of three working parts: 1) the renderer, 2) the vector tiles, and 3)
the style rules.

How vector maps work

1) The renderer
Vector maps are rendered with Mapbox GL. Mapbox GL uses the power of WebGL to
combine vector data and style instructions and draw them in the client. To display a map in
web browsers, use the Javascript library Mapbox GL JS which draws the map and allows for
motion and interactivity to be incorporated with code. For maps in native applications such as
Mapbox iOS and Android SDKs, use Mapbox GL Native.

2) The vector tiles
The vector tileset is a set of points, lines, and polygons that represent natural and manmade
features across the globe. Vector tilesets describe the geometry of each feature, where they
belong in the world, and other key properties. They do not include any inherent style
properties. This data is optimized in vector tile format which renders the data lightweight and
ready for delivery on mobile or web platforms.

How vector maps work

3) The style rules
The map style itself is written as rules which define its visual appearance using the Mapbox
GL Style Specification. It specifies:
What data to draw
What order to draw the data in
How to style the data when drawing it
Don't worry you don't have to touch a line of code. Mapbox Studio's style editor provides the
user interface where you can define your map style. Behind the scenes, Studio creates this
file the

style.json

and hosts it on the Mapbox Styles API when published. This style is

then accessible via endpoint to add to your mobile or web app.
View the live version of map style hosted on the Mapbox Styles API at a url like:
https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/mapbox/streets-v9.html?#0/0/0

View the

style.json

style rules document at a url like:

https://api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/mapbox/streets-v9?#0/0/0

Best practices: Map design

Best practices: Map design
Map design is essentially a design problem that requires design thinking, planning and
vision. (This is the fun part.)
In this section, we will look at the design elements in your map style that should be
customized to reflect your product or brand's design aesthetic. You have complete control
over your map style—in fact, any feature can be customized. We recommend you begin
designing the following elements: color, typography, iconography, and texture.
Next, we will introduce some design principles important to cartography. Adhere to these
principles as you design to ensure the visual relationship is maintained. These principles are
not to be applied in isolation, but instead are complementary. Collectively, they help
cartographers and map designers create maps that successfully communicate geographic
information.

Design elements

Design elements
Consider the following elements to be the customizable parts of your map. The best place to
identify the design elements for your map is in your product or brand's styleguide. This
styleguide should contain fonts, colors, imagery, etc. specific to your brand and help you
make decisions about your map's customization.
Typically, you want your map to match your brand or to complement your brand's user
interface. Let's review each design element in detail to see the impact they have on your
map style.

Styleguide from the Blueprint map style.

Color

Color
Color is used in design to attract attention, group similar elements, show meaning, and
enhance aesthetics. We typically begin the design process with a color palette for each map,
comprised of a cohesive group of primary and accent colors. This is an iterative process.
Colors will most likely grow and morph once you start designing and seeing what works
together on your map. Just make sure your final map and palette are consistent and work
harmoniously together. Below are a few things to consider as you define the color palette for
your custom map.

Number of Colors
Use color conservatively. The eye can only process so much at a time, so a limited color
palette is best. Depending on the complexity of your map design, between 10-12 colors is
pretty standard for a full-body color palette. Also consider a significant portion of the
population has limited color vision, so style accordingly.
Both Mapbox Streets and Mapbox Outdoors use around a dozen unique colors, but a variety
of shades and tints.

Many conceptually similar features share the same hue value, to reinforce their meaning and
create a more cohesive map.

Color

Mapbox Street color variety
Limiting your colors will also help with visual harmony. For example, many features related
to navigation and transportation share the same blue hue: rail labels, highway shields, ferry
routes, and even road casings for this purpose.

Mapbox Streets blue transit icons

Color

Color Consistency
You can make subtle adjustments to your color palette while maintaining visual harmony by
using the same hue but altering the color's saturation or value levels. The hue value simply
represents the color of an item in the color wheel.

Saturation
Saturation represents the level of intensity in the color or the color's dominance. As you
decrease the saturation, the hue we becomes less vibrant and the color dominates less and
less. When you reach

saturation, no hue dominates and you end up with a dull gray

color.

Color

Value
Value is the dimension of lightness/darkness describing the overall intensity of light in the
hue. As you decrease the value, the hue becomes darker and at

becomes completely

black.

Let's say you start with a pale green from your color palette to use to style park polygons.
Then decide you want to differentiate between wooded areas and grass. Taking the original
green (shown below), I've create two new colors by lowering the value for a darker green
and then adding saturation for a brighter. Resulting in three color variations within the same
hue and harmoniously.

Typography

Typography
Typography is one of the most important design elements of your map and can make or
break the readability of your map. Labels, which represent most of the text you find in maps,
are often only one to three words long and are displayed at very small sizes. With this
constraint fonts with taller x-heights, open counters, and no serifs usually work best on
maps.
Your brand's font may or may not work for you map style. In that case, choose a font directly
from Studio that both works for your brand. Consider the font's quality, readability, and
personality.

Quality
High quality fonts offer a variety of styles: Italics, Caps, Caps Italic, and Small Caps,
weights: Ultra Light to Ultra Black and everything in between, and widths: Condensed,
Narrow, Normal, Mono, and Expanded, just to name a few. You can leverage this variety to
easily differentiate between labels and show hierarchy in your map styles.
The primary font for Mapbox maps is

Din Office Pro

Italic, Regular, and Bold variety. We use
your map has complete language.

for map styles used in the Medium,

Arial Unicode MS

as our fallback font to make sure

is mapped to the standard Universal
Character Set which supports a wide range of global languages.1 Most professional fonts do
Arial Unicode MS

not create character to support all languages, so a unicode fallback is necessary to ensure
global coverage.

Typography

Mapbox Streets

Blueprint
The Blueprint style is very minimalist and is primarily driven by one hue and one superfamily
typeface. The typeface is

FF Kievit

a typeface that explores the synthesis of the sans serif

form to the structure and proportions of a traditional serif font. The family spans nine weights
and includes small caps, true italics, and multiple figure sets – everything necessary for
2
creating sophisticated typographic systems. This typeface ships with Studio and only
employed Light, Light Italic, Italic, Bold, Black, and Black Italic variations.

Typography

Readability
Readability is about arranging words in a way that allows the readers eye to access the
content easily and intelligibly. This skill takes time to honed, but here are a few stellar ways
to greatly enhance the readability of your maps:
1. Diversity of label classifications. Design distinction into the classifications and
properties available in your label data. For example,

place labels

offer classifications

of cities, towns, villages, neighborhoods, and more. Create a system of treatment to
distinguish this diversity.
2. Diversity of label colors. This can be subtly enforced by altering the
value

saturation

of the same hue as shown in the Color section. This works particularly for styling

points of interest (POIs) to give distinction to categories of points, like cafes or schools
having distinct colors. But keep it moderate.
3. Control the spacing. Letter spacing (often called tracking) adjusts the spacing between
all the letters in a piece of text. This can help to make your labels look more open and
inviting. Tiny type is made more readable by opening the letter spacing a bit. As with
everything, use caution tracking is often wildly overdone. Also monitor your label width,
this determines how many letters fit on one row before a line-break occurs. Something
to be mindful of when working with Bold, Black or just more heavily typefaces.

Typography

Text halos
Text halos bring your labels to the foreground visually and help prevent background
elements, such as roads, waterways, etc., from diluting the comprehension of your labels.
The specific treatment here will vary from design to design but you want to pull your labels to
the foreground without making the halos obvious.
Take a look at the before and after below showing a small halo effect. Notice how much
easier it is to read the text after applying a small touch of halo.

Before: No text halo applied to labels

After: With text halo applied.
17

Typography

Personality
The personality of a typeface speaks to the voice and energy it exudes. Major typeface
styles are sans serif, serif, and script however sans serif fonts are popular on the web and
mobile because of the lower DPI (dots per inch) on screens. Three main types of sans serif
fonts: humanist, transitional and geometric. Humanist sans-serif typefaces mimic
handwriting and evoke a feeling of warmth and personality. Transitional sans serif typefaces
have strong strokes and are more upright and uniform. They typically have an unassuming,
authoritarian and modern personality. Geometric Sans Serif typefaces use geometric shapes
to form the backbones of the letters, which creates a strict, objective, and universal feel.
The fact is the details of a typeface–such as contrast, proportions and angles–can have a
big effect on its emotional characteristics. To help you decide, here are five questions you
should ask of any typeface you’re considering…
Purpose and mood?
Serif or sans serif?
Collaborative or contrast?
Creative or classic?
Take a look at some personality of these fonts used in a few of our designer map styles.

Typography

Roboto : Modern yet approachable

Decimal uses Roboto Condensed and Roboto Bold Condensed to achieve this modern
yet approachable feeling for it's dark but vibrant map style. Google describes Roboto as
"modern, yet approachable" and "emotional". Condensed fonts grab your attention due to
their slender, high-reaching vertical real estate. This font pairs very nicely with such an
extreme color palette and feel overly technical with the terminal, computer whiz theme.

Typography

Roboto Mono & Old Standard : Modern classic

North Star uses Roboto Mono in a variety of weights and styles. While "modern, yet
approachable" the monospace format which have the letters and characters occupy the
same amount of horizontal space similar to the lettering that would come from an oldfashioned typewriter. North Star pairs this font with gentle touches of Old Standard TT.
Another modern, yet classicist style font but with serif evoking an older, classic feeling of the
late 19th century. This combinations promotes the old modern mix of this map style.

Typography

Magda Clean Mono : Nostalgic grunge

Desert planet uses

Magda Clean Mono Offc Pro Bold

and

Magda Clean Mono Offc Pro Black

both available in Mapbox Studio. Another monospace, this font has a boxy typewriter look
giving it a throwback appeal. There is also a grungy, edginess to the wide letters and the
letter spacing added to these labels. This font has tons of personality and adds a strong
narrative to this deserted, almost dystopic map style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font

https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-kievit

Iconography

Iconography
The icons you use on your map typically indicate points of interest or POIs. These can be
anything from libraries to cafes to museums to bus stops. The icons you use in your map
should reinforce your brand and strengthen your map's brand recognition and readability.
Successful map icons must be widely recognizable even across cultures, as simple as
possible, and legible at sizes as small as 11px. Creating your own custom map icons for
each project is rather time-consuming, so Mapbox has created a collection of pixel-aligned
point of interest icons made by cartographers for cartography. This collection of icons is
called Maki.
Maki aims to be the most high quality, consistent, and comprehensive point of interest icon
set possible. Maki icons are designed simply and work seamlessly with Mapbox Studio. The
Maki icon editor allows you to customize the style of your icons you can add and remove
these icons, categorize and style them in groups, and download them for your map styles.

Full Maki icon set.

Iconography

Mapbox Streets icons

Maki icons used in Mapbox Streets map style.
Notice that the icons are grouped and style into familiar categories. For example, the food
category is all orange and the transits all blue. These groupings help the viewer recognize
and find POIs more easier as they navigate the map.

Styled and categorized icons each with a light stroke to pull them slightly from the
background in the Mapbox Streets map style.

Iconography

Mapbox Streets icons
Mapbox Satellite Streets however deals with a Satellite imagery layer, and this requires a
different treatment of the icons to ensure they are legible over varying terrain and urban
landscapes.

Maki icons used in Mapbox Satellite Streets map style.

Simple white icons with a dark gray stroke that blends with varying terrain for Mapbox
Satellite Streets map style.

Texture

Texture
Texture is an added bonus in your map design toolkit. It represents the perceived surface
quality of a design piece. Patterns can be added to map features to differentiate or blend
elements. They can also stand independently as a texture for the map or full background
patterns.
Textures need to be seamless us properly apply them to your maps in Mapbox Studio. A
seamless texture is an image or pattern that can be placed side-by-side with itself without
creating a noticeable boundary between two copies of the image.

Adding an aged texture
The Vintage map style was designed to mimic the look and feel of traditional printed maps.
The aged pattern is applied to the land and bathymetry custom that was data added to the
map style. Over two dozen layers were styled layer-by-layer at a very low opacity with
slightly different color tints to get this effect.

Texture

Dark brown dot pattern is meant to add subtle texture to the water and is added layer-bylayer at low opacity for effect.

64x64px.svg

texture applied to the Vintage map style.

Texture

Adding a pop art feel
The Whaam! map style employs bright, playful patterns to show both texture and evoke the
feeling of this pop art inspiration. The entire water feature is filled with a blue dot pattern.
Landuse polygon features are all classified separately with a green striped pattern and are
slightly transparent. This allows for areas with overlapping landuse types to appear darker
showing elevation and hill shading in the land.

A contrasting blue dot pattern applied over light blue water and vibrant, green line texture for
park-type land use.

32x32px

texture applied to water for the Whaam! map style
27

Texture

32x32px.svg

pattern applied to greenspace land use for the Whaam! map style

Recommended Reading
Designing the Vintage map in Mapbox Studio
Designing the Whaam! map style in Mapbox Studio
Making and importing your custom patterns and textures to Studio

Design principles

Design principles
Here are some of the core design principles that cartographers and map designers apply as
they style their maps. Together these principles form a system for seeing and understanding
the relative importance of the content in the map and on the page. Without these, mapbased communication will fail. The four design principles we will cover include:
Contrast
Hierarchy
Density
Legibility

Blueprint map style

Contrast

Contrast
Human beings are wired to notice difference. This is what makes contrast such a powerful
design principle in map design. Contrast attracts attention and draws the eye. This
separates features from the surrounding elements and can instantly create emphasis and
interest. In addition to attracting attention, contrast establishes boundaries between
elements.

Color Contrast
Keep a healthy amount of color contrast in your map style to keep it vibrant and legible. You
don't want too much contrast or your colors could scream at the viewer. If your colors are too
muted they may start to blend together. Increase the saturation of your colors to push the
contrast if necessary.

Low contrast map with soft, less saturated blue, greens, and a baseline gray for labels.

Contrast

High contrast map with vibrant more saturated blues, greens, and a darker gray for labels.

Contrast and readability
The amount of color contrast in your map style can affect your map's readability. For
example, the text labels and iconography could either blend into the background elements or
stand out in a glaring way. Keep this in mind as you are working with your map's color
palette. A healthy amount of color contrast in your style will help those with low vision, color
blindness, or worsening vision better see and read the text on your map. Make sure you
have a fair amount of contrast between elements, but not too much.

Contrast

Visualizing data
Many maps use bright, primary colors against a stark, muted background map to highlight
important elements or show data visualizations. As long as there is simplicity and harmony
within your color palette this technique works well and can be super easy to customize or
alter with other color schemes. Decimal is one such style. This minimalist map style that
works great as a base for data visualizations or as a backdrop for your next game.

Decimal map style, Tristen Brown

Hierarchy

Hierarchy
Hierarchy helps viewers focus on what is important while identifying patterns. A strong,
visible hierarchical a system is one of the most effective ways to increase comprehension.
Color and scale are two major design elements you want to finesse to leverage the visual
hierarchy of your map style.

Color
Use color to differentiate and show a hierarchy of importance between map features. The
road networks in Mapbox Streets while using the same width are distinguished by color to
show hierarchy. Motorways are styled orange, high performance roads are yellow, and
primary roads are white while maintaining the same line width. The next level of roads are
styled with a thinner width and less vibrant white are recedes more into the background, still
noticeable but docile.

Hierarchy

Scale
Scale is both the overall size of an object and that object's size in relationship to other
elements around it. Identifying a system of sizes to rank map features like labels or road
widths will help to indicate the hierarchy of these features.
Typographic hierarchy
This system employs both scale, stylistic elements (like font weight, i.e. light, normal, bold,
etc.), as well as treatment (like uppercase, lowercase, italic, outline only, etc.) to establish an
order of importance. This hierarchy will guide the viewer easily and quickly to the start and
end of information, whilst enabling them to isolate certain information based on the
consistency of use in the style throughout.
Below is the hierarchy system for the Blueprint map, which uses a variety of techniques to
indicate importance and differentiation by forming visual patterns for the user to better
comprehend the map style.

Typographic styling of place, road, marine, and waterway labels in the Blueprint map style.

Hierarchy

Typographic hierarchy structured by city size.

Differentiation in typographic treatment for city and neighborhoods.

Hierarchy

Here in Mapbox Streets, the scale variation is more subtle overall but your eyes are lead
around the map by order of scale in the place labels.

General purpose maps
Maps that style a variety of physical and cultural features, like terrain, roads, transit stops,
and points of interest (POIs), are general purpose maps. They show hierarchy differently
than thematic maps which normally feature a single attribute or the relationship among
several attributes.
For general purpose maps, features should not overpower each other and should essentially
lie on the same visual plane. Here hierarchy is usually more subtle and the viewer brings
elements to the forefront by focusing attention on them.

Hierarchy

Thematic maps
Thematic maps are typically emphasize specific feature or location to show prominence.
Oftentimes, the theme itself is more important than the geographic context. Hierarchy then
starts to present itself in the grouping of features as stylistic elements by color, texture,
scale, and/or style.

Whaam! map style - thematic styling with high hierarchical focus.

Density

Density
Although map features may be available at a certain zoom, features should not be styled
based on availability. Revealing too much information at a certain zoom may cause
confusion or dilute your map's focus. As you design your map, consider how the density
of information may increases the visual weight of the map, disturbing the visual hierarchy.
The map below shows Washington DC styled with a measured density for the points of
interest or POIs. More prominent POIs are styled based on
included Mapbox Streets data.

scalerank

which is a field

is determined based on an algorithm that

ranks importance based size and appended data from Wikipedia. Mapbox Streets brings
in POIs ranked at

most important and is styled in lower priority than neighborhoods,

highway shields, and transit stops. Using information like

scalerank

or other

classifications to vary styling and priority are good ways to control density.

POIs grouped by

scalerank

and prioritized accordingly.

The example below groups all POIs into one layer which doesn't allow for differentiation
in styling. POIs show up at city view although they may not be recognizable landmarks
and add no value to the map at this level. A few of these POIs are also appearing
instead of transit stops or highway shields which doesn't help navigation or wayfinding.
Measured density makes your map more readable and helps focus the narrative and
usability of your map.

Density

POIs styled densely with no prioritization.

Zoom levels
Web maps, as opposed to print maps, have more flexibility in what information can be
shown and when, thanks to zoom levels. Users can explore the map from a global level and/
or zoom into street level detail and everything in between. Zoom levels move from
z22

and along the way the appropriate data is available from vector tiles to be styled.

Sometimes, it is not possible to legibly display data at a given zoom level. For example, a
dense series of topographic lines would turn into a jumble of features when viewing the map
at the state or regional zoom level. Conversely, styling every POI, like parks, buildings,
restaurants, etc., at a city level would appear too coarse and hard to comprehend at a
glance. To prevent these potential issues, the cartography team has determined optimal
maximum and minimum zoom levels to make data available in our Mapbox vector tiles.

Global view

Density

National view

Regional view

City view

z12

Density

Street view

z17

Legibility

Legibility
To be legible is to be easily read which is of utmost importance in map design so the user
can easily understand how to navigate the represented space. Legibility of most map
features depends on color and size, and in addition to labels and text, can be iconography
too. Icons must be designed simply enough to recognize at small sizes and offer good
contrast against the background.

Iconography
For select cities and countries, our Mapbox Streets icons feature local public transit icons
and highway shields to help orient the user by visually connecting the map to their
environment. We redesigned original symbols, simplifying the details and exaggerating the
form while balancing good pixel-alignment and visual parity with the originals.

POI icons, highway shields and rail icons used in Mapbox Streets.

Legibility

Mid-zoom view of POI icons and highway shields in Mapbox Streets.

Text
A good choice of font with high x-heights and suitable at smaller sizes, color contrast for
visual separation between foreground and background, as needed letter spacing, and the
use of text halos can vastly improve legibility in text labels.

Legibility

Proximity
The proximity of map elements to each other is also important to the overall legibility.
Proximity calls for related items to be grouped visually, creating less clutter and making for
a more organized layout. At times you will have features very close or overlapping your
map, as you style create a balance by using lighter color saturation, softer opacity, and
substantial contrast text and text halos if text is involved. Balance is key.

Mapbox Outdoors styles overlapping ski paths, contour lines, and hillshades using color
and style to differentiate.

Recommended Reading
Designing Mapbox Streets and Outdoors for Mobile
Mapbox Outdoors redesign

Special considerations

Special considerations
The Mapbox Cartography Team prides itself on making maps are both usable and beautiful.
Our core Mapbox map styles are created largely for general purpose use. The Cartography
Team styles almost every map feature and classification using our global Mapbox data, and
the maps are ready to plug and play into any mapping app. We also have a few speciality
maps we've been working on with specific use cases, conditions, and/or users in mind.
For these kinds of maps use design thinking, we to help ensure that the user experience is
prioritized, design execution is optimized for platform and performance, and that the map
works in the overall environment it will ultimately live in. Environmental considerations can
be anything from the time of day, location of interaction (outside in the sun, inside an office),
mode of transportation (car, bike, or foot), the platform being used to view the map (mobile,
web, etc.), or even the user interface associated with the map style.
This process helps us build holistic design solutions for our products and the experience of
end users. These are the use cases we are developing design processes for:
Maps for mobile
Maps for navigation
Maps for data visualization

Maps for mobile

Maps for mobile
Smartphones play an important role in helping people navigate their environment and get
them to where they need to go. 67% of smartphone owners use their phone at least
occasionally for turn-by-turn navigation while driving. As we design more and more for
mobile here at Mapbox, we take into account the unique challenges that mobile maps face
as opposed to that of desktop and print maps. Mobile maps have a range of user and
environmental variables that require consideration throughout the design process.

Considerations
Spatial restriction. The mobile screen reintroduces spatial restriction to the design
process. Not only is the screen smaller, but it’s also a smaller viewport showing a
similar-sized desktop map, meaning much less map data is viewed at once. This means
visual cues and connections are going to be harder to make, and different styling
decisions must be made since fewer map elements can be seen.
Map interactivity. The mobile map user is constantly fiddling with the map. Luckily
interactivity such as zoom, pan, and pitch variables can be automated and controlled by
other information such as user location, user speed, and defined route distances. Not
only does this free the user’s hands, but it also adds to list of variables designers must
account for when designing mobile maps.
User manipulation. Users tend to manipulate the mobile maps constantly. Although
using one’s fingers to zoom, pan, and pitch a map is really no different than using a
mouse, the size constraint typically requires more user interaction and manipulation to
view more map context and content. We can see a loose connection between screen
size and interactivity, due to the simple fact that there is less map information shown at
1
any given time on mobile maps.

Maps for mobile

Mapbox Streets on mobile device.

Testing platforms
Testing our maps on as many devices as possible gives us critical feedback that propels the
iterative design process, and verifies that the user experience will be as fun and productive
as possible. One of the main tools we use to quickly test styles is the recently released
Studio Preview for iOS. A companion to Mapbox Studio, the preview app allows us to log
into our account and quickly prototype map styles within the environments it will be used in,
and to mimic the user experience.

Recommended reading
Say hello to the Studio Preview app - view map styles directly from your device
Bring your maps to life with Runtime Styling on mobile
Designing Mapbox Streets and Outdoors for mobile

1. Designing Maps for Mobile, Nat Slaughter / Mapbox ↩

Maps for navigation

Maps for navigation
There is a lot of overlap between designing for mobile and navigation because, primarily,
navigation mapping is done on a mobile device. In addition, navigation maps must
harmoniously integrate toggleable traffic data and other information overlays to provide user
controlled context. To provide guidance to the map for drivers, cyclists or pedestrian, the
Cartography Team took into consideration a variety of environmental, speed, and time
factors for the Mapbox Navigation suite of maps.
In the early phases of the map design process, we consider:
The physical relationship between the map and the user:.How far away is the map
from the person? Is it hand-held for a pedestrian, or fixed to a windshield for a driver?
Viewing time: Is the user viewing the map in short, fragmented glances, or
contemplatively sitting with it?
User manipulation. If the user is currently driving to their destination the animation
along the path is most likely be leading the show. Rotating and zooming as their phone
moves closer to their destination. Consider the camera behaviors location (lat/lng) and
zoom level (camera position) and rotation and pitch as you style.
Controlled Density. Custom overlay data, such as traffic or bike lanes, should be kept
consistent and harmonious with the underlying map style. The data must also add value
instead of muddying the waters. The most important information should be clearly
visible at a glance.

Maps for navigation

Mapbox Navigation Guidance Day Map

Recommended reading
Better maps for navigation
Offline navigation embedded in cars
Designing Maps for Mobile

Maps for data visualization

Maps and data visualizations
Data visualizations can be expressive, powerful opportunities to use maps to tell stories and
understand information. A compelling basemap sets the scene and deepens the relationship
between the what and the where of the information narrative. When uncovering spatial
patterns or getting actionable insights from data, seamless integration between the map,
map and interface are key. The use-case is comprehension, and helping the user see the
relationships in the data is the ultimate goal.
Consider the following as you co-design your map and data visualizations:
Explore or explain your data. Exploratory data visualizations are appropriate when
you have tons of data and you’re not sure what’s in it. Exploration is generally best done
at a high level of granularity. If you oversimplify or strip out too much information, you
could end up missing something important. Explanatory data visualization is appropriate
when you already know what the data has to say, and you are trying to tell that story to
somebody else. You know the story and therefore you can design to specifically
accommodate and highlight that story. Edit the data by deciding which information stays
1
in, and which is distracting or irrelevant and should come out.
Design a three-dimensional visual hierarchy. Often times we see data visualizations
that seem to plop the data onto the map. The key is integration, you want the map and
data to work together not against each other. Color, value, and saturation are key for
these relationships. Start with a strong, limited color palette with high contrast. If you
start with the Light or Dark style, alter the hue to fit your brand, start small with line
widths and ease shapes from

100%

opacity. The goal is to produce a three-

dimensional effect in which certain key features appear to rise off the map's twodimensional surface.
Categorize similar data. Early in the design process, identify the best and most
accurate way to sort and categorize your data. Depending which technique you plan to
use for displaying your data on the map, choropleth, heat map, etc., determining the
appropriate groupings for your data will keep your data honest and provide valuable
insights.

Maps for data visualization

Visualizing Eurovision Shazam tags with Mapbox GL

Visualization styles
Dot density — A map style that uses a dot or other symbol to show the collective
presence (density) of a feature or phenomenon. For example, showing busy
intersections or high/low volumes of activity within areas.
Choropleth — This is a thematic map style that applies shaded color or pattern textures
in proportion to the intensity of the data being displayed on the map. For example,
showing population density or per-capita income.
Hexagonal binning or hexbin — This map style is good for showing general themes
over a geography. It is less granular than dot density and not constrained by boundaries
as is the case with choropleth maps.
Heatmap — This map style enables the map viewer to perceive density of points
independently of the zoom factor. It is the least constrained of them all because it does
not correspond to geographic bounds.

Custom data
There are a variety of ways to add data to your map. First, you can upload data directly into
Mapbox Studio, this will convert your data into a web and mobile ready, highly performant
tileset. Your custom tileset will be accessible in any Mapbox Studio style. Another method is
to create a dataset with your custom data. This is done in the dataset editor, there you can

Maps for data visualization

add data sources, draw new data points, lines, and polygons, combine various data sources
and maintain your raw data. Once you are done augmenting your data, you can export it as
a tileset and add it to your map for styling. Choosing a tileset or dataset depends on if you
are planning to use the data immediately in your style or if you plan to enhance or manage
the data over time.
The final way to add data is with Mapbox GL JS which allows you to add the data
dynamically. Check this example for adding live

GEOJSON

data to your map style. Find out

about How Uploads Work to learn the differences between tilesets and datasets, how the
upload process works, techniques for uploading, and resources for getting started.

Recommended reading
Dots vs. polygons: How I choose the right visualization
Light and Dark maps for data visualization
Data underneath: Labels on top
Visualizing Eurovision Shazam tags with Mapbox GL

. Designing Data Visualizations by Julie Steele, Noah Iliinsky ↩

Getting started with Mapbox maps

Getting started with Mapbox maps
When you design your maps with Mapbox you have access to our global data. This data
happens in all locations and at every zoom level. As you style, make sure to zoom in and out
and consider how they style looks at each zoom level. The design elements we just covered
visually represent the natural and manmade map features that make up our world.

Mapbox tilesets

Mapbox-provided tilesets
Mapbox web and mobile-ready vector tiles are

75%

smaller than a raster tilesets. This

results in fast, smooth zooming from the worldview of a map down to street-level detail.
Mapbox vector tilesets include:

mapbox-streets

mapbox-terrain

, and

mapbox-traffic

which are outlined in the next section.
Vector tileset data consists of geographically referenced natural and manmade features
converted into

points

lines

, and

polygons.

This is the underlying framework of the map

and provides the information that will be styled. Map data features typical fall into the
following general categories.

Natural features
water
land
land use
terrain

Mapbox tilesets

Road networks
motorway
trunk
primary, etc.

Place labels
country
state
city
island, etc.

Mapbox tilesets

General labels
marine
water
roads, etc.

Points of interest (POI) labels
natural reserves
businesses
restaurants
attractions, etc.

Mapbox tilesets

Transit labels
airport labels,
rail labels,
highway shields, etc.

Mapbox Streets

Mapbox Streets
mapbox.mapbox-streets-v7

Mapbox Streets vector tiles are largely based on data from OpenStreetMap, a free and
global source of geographic data built by volunteers. While styling, reference this Mapbox
Streets data overview, an in-depth guide to the data contained in the Mapbox Streets vector
tileset. This outlines additional layer properties such as types (
(

class

type

) and classifications

) that will allow you to filter your data and style certain elements distinctly.

Explore the Mapbox Streets tileset! You may not need to add any custom data. Mapbox
Streets may have the data you need, and you can filter this data to a separate layer and
style it accordingly.

Mapbox Terrain

Mapbox Terrain
mapbox.mapbox-terrain-v2

Mapbox Terrain provides hillshades, elevation contours, and land cover data all in vector
form. Mapbox Terrain is based on data from a variety of sources (see the about page for
details). When using the Mapbox Terrain layer publicly in a design or application you must
provide proper attribution. While styling, keep the Mapbox Terrain data overview open to
ensure you are assigning the appropriate classifications to your map style. These values are
also automatically shown to populate as filters directly in Studio, but the reference offers
more details to their definition.

Mapbox Traffic

Mapbox Traffic
mapbox.mapbox-traffic-v1

Mapbox Traffic provides constantly updating congestion for both directions on two-way
roads. Traffic data aligns with Mapbox Streets
class

values. The

congestion

roads

layer and you can filter based on

field is a measure of the relative slowdown a road segment

is experiencing. The values range from

low

severe

When styling congestion, our cartographer's typically add a positive

line-offset

to the layer

to visually separate the directions of travel. While styling, reference the Mapbox Traffic data
overview open to ensure you are assigning the appropriate class values to your map style.
Keep in mind, this data does not appear until

zoom level 6.0

Mapbox template styles

Mapbox-provided map styles
Before you're off to the races, let's go over the template styles that are available in Mapbox
Studio. You can use any of these templates as a starting point your map style. You just need
to start a new style with one of the Mapbox provided styles and begin customizing it to fit
your brand. But which style should you pick? That depends on what you are trying to
achieve and what kind of data your map wants to highlight.
Basic/Bright
Mapbox Streets
Mapbox Outdoors
Mapbox Dark/Mapbox Light
Mapbox Satellite/Mapbox Satellite Streets
Mapbox Traffic Day/Mapbox Traffic Night
Let's review each map style, so you can find the one that best fits your needs.

Basic/Bright

Both Basic and Bright are open source map styles that are primarily for learning about
Mapbox map styles.

Basic
Mapbox Basic is a simple, flexible starting map style if you just need a simple style. The
classifications for roads and place labels have been generalized into major or minor
categories covering the following types of features:
Roadways. Lightly organized road data, designed to show very basic major and minor
road hierarchy.
Administrative boundaries. Only country boundaries are styled.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, and only highly
ranked points of interest are styled with only text.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. General hierarchy of location labels including countries, islands, cities, and
suburbs, towns, hamlets, villages, and neighborhoods.

Basic/Bright

Bright
Mapbox Bright is another good template to learn how data layers are categorized and
generally styled. This style includes more classifications of label and road types and puts
data layers into relevant categories covering the following types of features:
Roadways. Organized road data, designed to show the different classifications of road
types available with Mapbox Streets.
Administrative boundaries. A global political and administrative boundary layer.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, famous
landmarks, and neighborhood stores.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. A general hierarchy of location labels, from countries to cities, towns, and
villages and neighborhoods.
Iconography. This style includes general motorway highway shields and uses a texture
for the water layer.

Basic/Bright

Streets

Mapbox Streets
Mapbox Streets is our flagship style, it is a comprehensive, general-purpose map that
emphasizes accurate, legible styling of road and transit networks.

Vibrant colors
The Mapbox Streets high-contrast color system allows the viewer to easily recognize the
map's features and quickly understand its hierarchies and classifications. The color system
is fine-tuned to work perfectly at each level and shifts subtly across zooms.

Streets

Detailed transit styling
Mapbox Streets includes a wide variety of transit layers – from motorways to paths to ferries
– and has been designed to provide an intricate rendering of their routes, intersections, and
overlaps. In select cities and countries, Mapbox Streets also features local public transit
icons and highway shields to help orient the user and connect the map to their environment.
For increased legibility and consistency, the Cartography Team designed each global transit
over a two dozen icons and added them to this map to add in place and comprehension for
global usage.

Streets

Points of interest (POIs)
Mapbox Streets features a broad range of POIs styled to indicate category and filtered to
only show the most important POIs across the zoom range. These icons from our set of
open source Maki icons. Maki icons are designed simply and work seamlessly with Mapbox
Studio. The Maki icon editor allows you to customize the style of your icons you can add and
remove these icons, categorize and style them in groups, and download them for your map
styles.

Streets

Additional design features
Roadways. Highly organized road data, designed to present a clearly legible hierarchy
of all road types across a wide zoom range.
Administrative boundaries. A global political and administrative boundary layer.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, famous
landmarks, and neighborhood stores.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. A complete hierarchy of location labels, from countries and states down to
villages and neighborhoods.
Terrain. Vivid hillshading show elevation, contour lines, and a tactile topography.
Unique iconography. Select countries and cities feature custom highway shields and
public transit icons.

Outdoors

Mapbox Outdoors
Mapbox Outdoors is a general-purpose map with curated tilesets and specialized styling
tailored to hiking, biking, and the most adventurous use cases.To meet the needs of the
bikers, hikers, runners, and skiers that rely on Mapbox Outdoors, our cartographers mined
OpenStreetMap for its extensive trail, path, and piste information, and developed styling that
clearly articulates each type for maximum legibility.

Outdoors

Curated terrain data
Mapbox Terrain's global elevation and hillshade data lie at the heart of Mapbox Outdoors.
We processed sources from 24 datasets across 13 organizations, including the U.S.
Geological Survey, Norwegian Mapping Authority, and Canadian GeoBase, combining the
natural features into a robust tileset with necessary path and trail data for an outdoors map.

Relevant points of interest
Mapbox Outdoors contains an array of points of interest (POI) data relevant to active use
cases: you can find campsites, public restrooms, and even water fountains in these
specialized layers.

Outdoors

Additional design features
Roadways. Highly organized road data, designed to present a legible hierarchy of all
road types across a wide zoom range.
Administrative boundaries. A global political and administrative boundary layer.
Paths and trails. Hiking paths, footways, cycleways, and ski trails.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, famous
landmarks, and neighborhood stores.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. A complete hierarchy of location labels, from countries and states down to
villages and neighborhoods.
Terrain. Vivid hillshading delivers visually tactile topography for outdoor and active
lifestyle apps.
Unique iconography. Select countries and cities feature custom highway shields and
public transit icons.

Dark/Light

Mapbox Dark and Mapbox Light
Mapbox Light and Mapbox Dark are subtle, full-featured maps designed to provide
geographic context while highlighting the data on your analytics dashboard, data
visualization, or data overlay. The Cartography Team created two tightly constrained color
palettes that use slight shifts in hue and value to provide depth and space without
overwhelming overlaid content.

Dark/Light

Mapbox Streets data
Mapbox Light and Dark use the same vector tile source as our general-purpose maps,
Mapbox Streets, and contain the full range of geographic information required to provide
context for overlays. Light and Dark are specially designed to show a full set of
cartographic features without distracting from your content. The Cartography Team
modified every element of these maps –thinning line widths, lowering label densities,
reducing contrast – to make sure they always complement your project.

Additional design features
Roadways. Highly organized road data, designed to present a clearly legible hierarchy
of all road types across a wide zoom range.
Administrative boundaries. A global political and administrative boundary layer.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, famous
landmarks, and neighborhood stores.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. A complete hierarchy of location labels, from countries and states down to
villages and neighborhoods.
Terrain. Subtle hillshade complements the simple design with topography for context.

Satellite/Satellite Streets

Mapbox Satellite and Mapbox Satellite Streets
Mapbox Satellite is our global high-resolution satellite imagery. Mapbox Satellite Streets
combines the Mapbox Satellite basemap with vector data from Mapbox Streets to bring
contextual information. Mapbox Satellite Streets is designed to enhance our vibrant Satellite
imagery with a light layer of Mapbox Streets data. Our designers have created clear and
legible road hierarchies with a comprehensive set of road, place, and feature labels that
balance legibility and usability.
Mapbox Satellite Streets uses same vector tile source as our general-purpose maps and
contains the full range of geographic information required to provide context for overlays.

Satellite/Satellite Streets

Imagery
Mapbox Satellite imagery comes from a variety of commercial providers, as well as open
data from NASA, USGS, and others. It is s color-corrected, cloud-free raster tileset. As cities
and landscapes change, we add newer, clearer, and more attractive imagery.

Satellite/Satellite Streets

Global coverage
Cloudless for zoom levels

0–8

and available from

z0-19

Mapbox Satellite imagery comes

from a variety of sources depending on zoom level and geographic availability.
Zoom levels 0-6. Uses cloud-free data from NASA MODIS satellites.
Zoom levels 7-12. Uses the NASA/USGS Landsat 5 & 7 imagery.
Zoom levels 13+. Use a combination of open and proprietary sources, including
DigitalGlobe for much of the world, USDA’s NAIP 2011–2013 in the contiguous United
States, and open aerial imagery from Denmark, Finland, and parts of Germany.

If you notice an area where imagery needs improvement or updates for any reason, let us
know by leaving your feedback with our imagery request tool. This tool adds your requests
to a master list that we consult when prioritizing updates. If you wish to recommend an
imagery source, please mention it in your request. Please note that imagery is not improved
on a set schedule and is updated when and where it becomes available.

Satellite/Satellite Streets

Additional design features
Roadways. Highly organized road data, designed to present a clearly legible hierarchy
of all road types across a wide zoom range.
Administrative boundaries. A global political and administrative boundary layer.
Built features. Building footprints, rail stations, urban parks, land use, famous
landmarks, and neighborhood stores.
Natural features. Rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, coastal boundaries, parks, land
cover, and beaches.
Places. A complete hierarchy of location labels, from countries and states down to
villages and neighborhoods.
Unique iconography. Select countries and cities feature custom highway shields and
public transit icons.

About the Author

Amy Lee Walton is a multidisciplinary designer that walks the fine line between design and
code. At Mapbox, she brings visual narrative and systems-based design thinking into her
cartography work. She touches many facets of cartography and user experience design
including designing beautiful thematic maps, designing and maintaining general purpose
Mapbox GL maps, querying open source datasets, conducting online and in-person user
testing, and delivering valuable insight to product roadmaps for user-centered improvements.
Amy Lee holds an MFA in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA,
where she coalesced graphic design with physical computing, generative and creative code,
and digital fabrication. She has designed, engineered, and shown her interactive installations
abroad with in multiple shows in The Netherlands and done project-based documentation
work in Israel.
An active speaker, Amy Lee builds curriculum for and leads talks and workshops discussing
the design process, purposeful programming, cartography and visual narratives. She's
passionate about engaging in acts of social good, cultivating your personal network, and
championing diversity and inclusion at your place of employment. Check out her Revision
Path interview to hear her thoughts on design thinking, treating code like a paintbrush, and
changing the way people navigate the planet. Read her Communication Arts interview,
Designer as Navigator, to find out how she got started with cartography.

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