How to make a custom ocean map

Most web maps focus on the land features, and the ocean is often left as a flat blue polygon. Our Ocean map provides global bathymetry, including sea floors, depth contours and labels, and shaded relief.

This guide explains how to customize the ocean depth styling in Map Designer to get your own maritime map.

Get started

To start customizing the Ocean map, open it in our map design editor.

Open Ocean map in editor

The editor loads with the Quick edit panel open, allowing you to make simple modifications of the map color range and fonts.

Fine-tune colors and shading

The Ocean map uses several dataset to render sea floor elevation and give it beautiful shading. You can use various styling methods that apply to both land terrain and sea floors.

  1. Go to Layers → block Ocean → layer Ocean RGB.

  2. In the layer settings panel, set the Visualization method:

    • To use sea floor shading (3D), select Hillshade and adjust the shading method, color, opacity, and other properties. See the hillshading guide to learn more.

    • To use color relief (flat), select Color relief and choose a Color ramp from the presets. See the color relief guide to learn more.

Adjusting the Ocean map's color ramp

Customize grid lines

The latest version of our Ocean (v4) uses the Grid dataset to show lines for time zones, meridians, circles of latitude, tropical circles, and their labels.

  • Go to Layers → block Grid. Now you can adjust the line styling and label fonts.
  • To hide the grid lines, click the little eye icon to hide all the lines and labels.
  • If you need more granularity, expand the Grid block and work with individual layers.

Adjusting the grid lines

Add country borders

By default, the Ocean map is “clean” and contains no land-based administrative boundaries. You can add these from the MapTiler Planet dataset.

  1. Go to Layers and click the (+) Plus button to add a new layer.
  2. Select the MapTiler Planet data source.
  3. Add the country_border layer.
  4. Switch to the Style tab and adjust the color and width of the country borders.

To display only countries with a coastline, switch to the Data tab and add a Filter for the maritime attribute.

If you also want to show the names of the countries, follow the same steps to add the country_label layer.

Adding country borders to Ocean map

Customize depth layers

For the ocean floor changing based on the depth values, there are fully customizable layers of different colors, going from the lightest blue for a depth of 0 m to -50 m to the darkest for a depth of -11,000 m to -12,000 m. We are keeping consistent intervals between the depths, but you can modify the breakpoints if needed.

The depth labels on contours are also changing based on the ocean floor. With the depth getting lower than -4,000 m, the labels are paled out to stand out in the dark waters. Keep this in mind when modifying the depth layer and/or labels color.

Ocean depth labels styling

Use your map

When done, you can publish your custom map and share it with the world. The options are the same as when using a ready-made map.

The easiest way is to add the map to your website as an iFrame.