Mapbox in Wired: A Powerful New Mapmaking Tool Fit for Both Pros and Newbies

Wired.com
By Greg Miller
September 21, 2015

http://​www​.wired​.com/​2​0​1​5​/​0​9​/​m​a​p​b​o​x​-​s​t​u​d​io/

An international map of flight paths, styled in Mapbox Studio.
An inter­na­tion­al map of flight paths, styled in Map­box Stu­dio. Mapbox
Geo­da­ta is blow­ing up like crazy. As of last year, more than 680,000 apps in the Apple store were using loca­tion ser­vices to pin­point users and serve up site-spe­cif­ic direc­tions or restau­rant rec­om­men­da­tions (just to name two obvi­ous exam­ples). Enti­ties from city gov­ern­ments to human rights groups are upload­ing tor­rents of loca­tion data on every­thing from fruit trees to drone strikes. Wran­gling all that geo­da­ta and turn­ing into some­thing use­ful is a huge chal​lenge​.New web-based soft­ware from Map­box aims to help. The DC and San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny has been work­ing for more than a year to over­haul its Map­box Stu­dio soft­ware. Its intend­ed audi­ence is devel­op­ers and “super pow­er­ful high-end car­tog­ra­phers,” says CEO Eric Gun­der­sen. But you don’t have to belong to some elite car­to­graph­ic strike force to use it. It has a graph­ic inter­face that’s fair­ly easy to nav­i­gate, espe­cial­ly for peo­ple famil­iar with pro­grams like Illus­tra­tor or Pho­to­shop. The idea, Gun­der­sen says, was to cre­ate a pow­er­ful map­mak­ing tool for the pros that’s also acces­si­ble for the map­mak­ing masses.
A screenshot from Mapbox Studio, showing a map in the making of edible fruit trees in Portland, Oregon.
A screen­shot from Map­box Stu­dio, show­ing a map in the mak­ing of edi­ble fruit trees in Port­land, Ore­gon. Mapbox

“Map­mak­ing has tra­di­tion­al­ly con­sist­ed of 80% get­ting ready to design a map, fuss­ing with data­sources, installing soft­ware, and then 20% design,” says Tom MacWright, one of the lead devel­op­ers on the project. “A ton of work has gone into elim­i­nat­ing steps, remov­ing grunt work, so peo­ple can actu­al­ly be creative.”

That’s no small thing. In the past few years, map­mak­ing soft­ware has got­ten way more acces­si­ble. But most of the offer­ings, includ­ing those from Map­box, were either pret­ty lim­it­ed in what they could do or required you to do some cod­ing to cus­tomize your maps. If you want­ed to change a font, say, or the size of an icon, you’d have to code it in a text edi­tor window.

No cod­ing is required to use the new ver­sion of Stu­dio. It’s all online and the inter­face is point and click. Menus let you select a base map and add lay­ers of data, most­ly from open sources like Open Street Map and the US Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, or upload your own dataset. You can choose which fea­tures appear and dis­ap­pear at dif­fer­ent zoom lev­els, and slid­er bars allow you to cus­tomize col­ors, line widths, and the like. These are all impor­tant car­to­graph­ic design con­sid­er­a­tions, and Stu­dio was designed to nudge you toward good deci­sions. The goal was to cre­ate some­thing equal­ly use­ful for tech devel­op­ers who have no idea how to design and design­ers who have no idea how to code, Gun­der­sen says.

The "x-ray mode" in Mapbox Studio gives you an inside look at your data, in this case the data used in the map of fruit trees above.
The “x‑ray mode” in Map­box Stu­dio gives you an inside look at your data, in this case the data used in the map of fruit trees above. Mapbox

There’s also an inter­est­ing “x‑ray mode” for explor­ing your data. In this mode, the map turns black and you can mouse over it to see the dif­fer­ent kinds of data in a dataset so you can decide what to include and what to leave out of your final map (you might want to hide address­es so they don’t clut­ter your street map with a tan­gle of num­bers, for example).

What does this mean for the future of maps? Stu­dio should make it eas­i­er for devel­op­ers to cre­ate more con­text-depen­dent maps, says Map­box design­er Saman Bemel-Ben­rud. That might mean a nav­i­ga­tion app that high­lights stair­ways if you’re look­ing for bike direc­tions (because, you know, it’s hard to ride a bike on stairs), but not when you’re walk­ing or dri­ving. Or it could be a rideshare app that high­lights build­ing foot­prints when you’re stand­ing in the mid­dle of a busy city block so you know exact­ly where stand to wait for your car.

Unlike Google, which sells busi­ness­es access to their mas­sive trove of maps, Map­box sells busi­ness­es tools they can use to make their own maps (you can play around for free, but pric­ing scales up with the num­ber of map views and mobile users). Their clients already include Foursquare, Pin­ter­est, Ever­note, and MapQuest (yes, they still exist!). If Stu­dio catch­es on the way they hope, that could be just the beginning.

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