How I Designed a Map
By: Nimit Shah
Tags: Mapping, How To, Mapbox, Cartography, Built With Mapbox

Ch. 4: The Typography

My map was coming along well, but I also wanted to change the font. In Jules Verne’s novel, it all starts with a cryptic note written in the Runic script. I wanted something similar — hard edges, geometrical lines harkening back to the Nordic style.

A cryptic runic note that starts the adventure in Jules Verne’s novel

After a long time looking for it, I found TT Firs, designed by Ivan Gladkikh and the TypeType team. It was perfect. It came in a huge range of variants, was neutral, and most importantly, legible at smaller sizes. It gave a beautiful character to my map.

It was now time to style POIs. I grouped them by type and assigned colours. Green for nature, purple for transport, teal for water-based transport, red for medical, and orange for education. Everything else would be brown. Groups would have similar colours but different icons. Fortunately, Mapbox had a whole set of POI icons ready to be used and customised.

I thought my map was coming along beautifully. There were a few niggles here and there, but V1 was complete! The niggles were mainly at higher zoom levels, but since my final aim was to map my whole road trip, I figured it was okay if I left it at that.

The map was designed only for Iceland so the colours and information density don’t work on all countries. V1 of my map can be interacted with on my website, and you’re free to explore and play around with it. It was now May 2016 and I couldn’t plot the road trip until I was back.

Ch. 5: Dusting it Off

Four months later I went on my trip. I spent 16 days in Iceland driving 3300 km taking it all in. I hiked random trails, saw stunning waterfalls, and experienced standing under the Aurora until my fingers went numb with the cold. It was a surreal experience.

However, I forgot about the map I’d made. Flash forward 4 years. Lockdown happened and I remembered my map. I came back to it and saw that there was a new version of Mapbox which let me do in 30 minutes what took me weeks. (insert laugh crying GIF).

While I was writing this post, Mapbox released another updated version! Do they even sleep?

I estimated that it would take me even more time to learn the new version and transfer my styles there, so I stuck with the old one. All I had to do now was chart my trip onto the map. To do that, I had to map out my whole trip and every single place I went to and then learn how to use Mapbox APIs to overlay it on top of my map. Thankfully I remembered my route almost completely.

Once I had my trip details, I learnt how GeoJSON works and used that to make a tileset in Mapbox which I could then style. Tilesets are essentially geographical representations of your data. It’s actually pretty simple once you know what to do, but it took me almost a week to figure all of it out. I tried it on another map once and then ported it onto Iceland. All of it finally clicked into place.

This took a lot more effort than I originally thought it would, but my map was better for it. I learned so much about cartography and technology by making just one map. I’ve always had huge respect for cartographers but it grew tenfold after this process; imagine creating maps 400 years back! It also gave me that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you make something with your hands entirely from the ground up.

Almost 1600 days after I first began, my map was finally complete. I exported the map and made some adjustments in Photoshop to create a final static version of my road trip to Iceland — which, by the way, included going to Snæfellsjökull where it all started.