Finding creativity
Creativity has never really been a strong suit of mine. I dabbled with music when I was younger, but getting into the flow of creating something new from scratch was always hard. I think I felt the need to make something truly unique and likable by the masses rather than being creative for myself. This challenge has been a great way for me to let go of any pre-existing views or ideas of what it means to create and just go with it.
Mapbox Studio
Making a "vintage" map seemed really daunting as I had no idea where to even start. After searching for "vintage mapbox style" I came across this article from a few years back by Amy Lee Walton. This pointed me in the right direction of using Mapbox Studio to create my own style. After working at Mapbox for almost a year, I'm a bit embarrassed to say I haven't really used the Studio product much besides tinkering in the Tilesets section.
Opening up the Style editor in Studio for the first time started to open up my eyes to the possibilities and different ways you can edit a map. I started with just throwing in some layers from the mapbox.mapbox-streets-v8 tileset to pull in water and landuse boundaries. I colored both of those in a palette I thought looked "old" but realized there wasn't enough coverage between the two to overlay the underlying map. Turns out you can adjust the basemap in quite a number of ways so I made it monochrome, changed the font, and removed visibility on all but place and POI labels. This gave the map a more old feel but there was still something missing. geojson.io became really helpful here as I wanted to add a colored, base polygon beneath all the other layers and I did this by just creating a bounding box around the border of Colorado, importing that as a tileset and then coloring it accordingly and putting it below the existing layers. Even after adding that layer the map still felt a bit plain so I threw in the terrain layer above all the previous ones and colored it brown to give it more of a paper feel. The end result is what you see above and I'm honestly surprised with how well it came out and how easy it was to use Mapbox Studio.
Addtional data used:
- USDA Administrative Forest Boundaries to add in national forest boundaries which are the dark green areas on the map.