When I blacked all the roads, I realized that some of them didn’t look right – the back color emphasized the width of the roads. Then, from a color palette that popped up I selected the color and shade I had in mind. To change the color, I clicked on the item I wanted to color and went to ‘Paint properties’ menu. I needed to change both as by default the roads were painted in dark grey. There are two attributes related to colors: the outline and fill. The next step was coloring of the roads or in my case - blacking the roads. The entire layer of all street names disappeared. To delete all the street names, I clicked on one of them and then under the tab ‘Layer’ I selected ‘Delete’. Getting rid of them was easy, using the left menu bar. icons of the bus stops, street names or landmarks. The Hybrid Night maps style had couple of things that I didn’t want, e.g. All the changes I made further were related to 13th zoom level only. It was not relevant in my case because I only needed a picture of the map taken from a certain zoom level.
you can specify which zoom level should display the name of the city or choose different colors of the water on each zoom level. It’s worth to mention that each zoom level can be customized separately, e.g. The closer the zoom level the more customized the map can be - if you zoom in you can modify small details of the map. The most optimal zoom level for me was 13, because I could see an entire map of the city. The next step was choosing the zoom level, which is a value representing the magnification on the map. This map style has the layers that I was interested in - road network and the color palette that I liked – white background and dark-grey color of the streets. I browsed through all of them and decided to go for the Hybrid Night. They all can be found by clicking ‘Open’ in the top-right corner. The tool allows you to start with 7 pre-made map styles: Basic, Basic Night, Basic Light, Hybrid, Hybrid Night, Labels and Labels Night.
#Create a custom map how to#
The short instruction how to find the API key that was quite useful in getting started. The API key was created automatically when I registered on and it was easy to find in the My Dashboard tab.
The Map Styler and it's documentation can be found on TomTom Developer Portal under Tools section.įirst, I was asked to insert my API key. So, if you're interested in creating map art, then here’s the step-by tutorial on how I completed my first project using the Map Styler. I opened the tool, spent some time playing with it and within less than an hour I had the perfect goodbye gift ready. So, I started researching alternative gifts and I quickly realized that TomTom's Map Styler was a tool that I could use to create the map I was looking for. I had a specific look in mind and unfortunately, I couldn’t find what I was looking for in stores or online. My gift idea was to find a map of Amsterdam that could be framed and hung up on the wall as a decoration. My friend Alessandro just graduated from a university in Amsterdam and was about to go back to his home country – Italy.īefore he left, I wanted to give him a personalized goodbye gift that would remind him of the city where he spent the last two years.