How to create and export your own map style in MapTiler Cloud

This document will show you how to create your own map style/design using MapTiler Edit Style. You will become familiar with the Edit Style editor environment and learn how to use this tool to achieve the best result according to your ideas.

Important notice

Think in advance about a map you will create and accordingly choose one of our maps that is most suitable for this purpose.

How to create a map with your own style

As the first step select a map. Go to MapTiler Cloud and select one. As I wrote above, choose a map that is ideal for your editing. If your goal is to create a simple map, you choose one that matches it. I chose a map in which everything that the map should contain is available. Ideal for this purpose is MapTiler Streets.

After clicking on the selected map. a page with more info will open. We will be interested in the "edit a copy" menu in the popup menu on the right below the map preview, which will open the MapTiler Style Edit. Here we get to the actual editing of the map.

Here we get to the interface of the editing tool.

A quick preview of working in Edit Style

We will first get acquainted with the environment of this editing tool.
The most important is the extensive left menu. In this menu, you will find everything we can adjust according to your needs and ideas/buildings, roads, highways, rivers, lakes, selected areas. We can edit for example the colors of these layers or the width of roads, we can also set the zoom level in which these layers to display, etc. After selecting one of these layers, the editing menu of this layer will expand.

In the top bar are menu options for saving the map, data source, style settings, and map view. Below this menu is the map itself, which we want to edit.

So let's go to the map adjustments themselves. In the first step, we will focus on colors. First, we will show how to change the color, in our case of oceans. In the left menu, we find the layer "water".

After selecting this layer, we see the expanded edit menu on its right. After scrolling down, we find the color editing menu for chosen layer. Clicking on the color definition field, the color palette opens and we can change the color. You can change its value either manually in the color palette or by overwriting the Hex code. In this way, we can change the color of all available layers.

Now let's try the adjustments in the lower layers. If we want to change a layer and do not know how this layer is named, we switch in the top bar in the "view" menu to "Inspect" mode.

Hover the cursor over the layer you want to edit and find out its name. After that, we can start editing the layer with this name.

We can do the same when editing other layers. If there are layers in the map that we don't need there, we can simply turn the visibility of those layers off.

When we are satisfied with the modifications, we can go to the last step and which is to save the modified map. In the upper bar, we choose the "Save" button. After clicking, the map with the modifications will be saved.

Now, you can your modified map in the list of your maps on the MapTiler Cloud.

How to export your custom style as a style.json file

Do you want to keep your custom style in your local storage? Do you want to use it somewhere else? Or do you want to use it for styling your maps in MapTiler Server? In case any of these scenarios are valid, you can export your custom style as a style.json file directly from MapTiler Cloud.

Just go to your "My maps" section at MapTiler Cloud - Maps, click the "three dots" symbol
and select "Export style". The download will start immediately.

Conclusion

We can say that MapTiler Edit Style is designed for both simple and more complex map editing. If we want to create our map only by changing colors, then we can use our Customize Tool. Colors can be changed quickly and easily. However, if you decide on more advanced editing, use MapTiler Edit Style.

Useful links

MapTiler Blog - Edit Style: Advanced changing of the map
MapTiler Cloud, Knowledge base - Make own map design
MapTiler Cloud: How to design your map with five clicks.
Map with custom colors - MapTiler Cloud Customise Tool - map design to fit your brand