Map design

Need a map with custom look? No problem, our intuitive no-code map design editor makes that possible. You can define every single aspect of a map’s visual style: colors, icons, fonts, transparency, shading, highlighting, language of labels, and much more.

Get started

MapTiler maps are professionally crafted by our cartographers to be aesthetically pleasing, visually fit their purpose, and work well at all zoom levels. This is quite tricky to do from scratch, which is why selecting one of our maps as a base is the easiest way to start. 👉 First steps in map design

Note that map design is about styling elements on the map, such as lines or icons, which is only possible on maps that use vector tiles. Maps that only consist of raster tiles (standard images) are not customizable. Likewise, if you need to create a map using your own imagery, you won't be "designing" the map but rather adding your images on top of an existing map as an overlay.

Tutorials

Many tasks in map design can be achieved in two ways: programmatically using our SDK JS, or in our visual map design editor. We have tutorials for both:

Use dark mode

We have distinctive light and dark map modes, so you can simply use them via presets in our SDK JS without having to design them first. 👉 How to use the dark mode

Advanced resources

Our online resources include all our maps, additional data that you can enhance the maps with, and detailed specifications of both to help you out with advanced design tasks.

Map styles

A map consists of two things: raw map data and a map style document (JSON), which defines the design of the map and visual styling of the data in it.

Datasets

Raw map data come in datasets of several types. Most MapTiler data is packaged in tilesets containing map tiles ready for building zoomable maps.