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Design your map 🚧

With our no-code Map Designer tool, you can customize every visual detail of a map: colors, fonts, icons, labels, and much more. This page helps you get started and points you to guides for specific design tasks.

Notes for complete beginners:

  • Map design is mostly about styling elements on the map, such as lines or icons. In maps made of raster tiles (images), like Satellite, you can only adjust the colors of the imagery itself. However, you can add customizable layers on top and style those freely.
  • If you want a map made from your own imagery, you don’t “design it”. Instead, you add your images on top of an existing map as an overlay.

Quick start 🚀

The easiest way to a custom map is to adjust one of our Catalog maps. They’re professionally designed to work well at all zoom levels, so you get a high-quality custom map in a short time.

Don’t have a map yet? Get started to create your account and pick one.

Tip

If you only need a different color scheme, such as dark, light, or pastel, you might not need to customize the map at all. Most Catalog maps come in several color variants, which you can pick when adding the map to your project. Variants keep receiving our style updates.

  1. Go to your MapTiler account and open the project with your map.
  2. Open the map and click Customize.
  3. Catalog maps can’t be edited directly, so you’ll be asked to make a copy first. Click Create a copy. Your copy opens in Map Designer.
  4. Change the design as you need. If you’re new to the editor, see 👉 Get started with Map Designer.
  5. To get feedback before your changes go live, share a preview link with your team or clients.

To get feedback on your design before it goes live, share a preview link, for example with your team or clients:

  1. Open your map and click Share.
  2. Under Share preview link, click Generate link.
  3. Click Copy and send the link to anyone you need. To check the design on your phone, click Open on mobile and scan the QR code.

The preview link dialog shows how many days remain until the link expires. You can then generate a new one. To stop sharing instantly, click Delete link.

Design guides

Step-by-step guides for specific design tasks in Map Designer:

Prefer to style maps in code? Many design tasks can also be done with MapTiler SDK JS. Changes you make in code on top of a Catalog map keep receiving our style updates. See the 👉 SDK code examples.

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.

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