How to style your travel map

Community Highlights Travellerspoint How to style your travel map

Looking to spice up your travel map and make it stand out from the crowd?

Travellerspoint's maps offer some great customisation options that can achieve just that. In this article, I'll run through some of the specific options you have access to with some brief explanation on how to achieve them.

A short backstory

Travellerspoint's mapping tool has evolved over 21 years to its current state.

• 2002 (site launch): it was nothing but a simple list of countries with dates attached to them.
• 2007: Our first actual mapping tool was a custom built map that used Flash. It allowed users to enter various locations and dates and drew curved or straight lines on the map depending on whether it was land based or air travel. Click the thumbnail to see what that looked like!

• 2011: As cool as it was to have our own mapping system, we wanted more and the Google Maps platform offered a great solution. In 2011 we launched a new Google Maps based solution adding more detailed locations and much more detailed maps.
• 2018: Google made a big change to its pricing model. There was little choice but to switch to something else so the move was made to use Mapbox as the mapping provider. This also brought a big increase in features with the introduction of custom map styles! It also moved the map licensing to an open source model which is far less restrictive
• 2023: we made a switch to the open source fork of the project - Maplibre.
• 2024: more map styles were added from the tile hosting service - Stadia Maps. The default map style is also served through their platform now. Depending on which map style you choose, it may come from Stadia maps, Maptiler or Mapbox at this point.

So, about those styles

There are now 10 different map styles available for the travel maps. On top of that there are options to customise the line widths and which lines are shown.

A note on these features
These are premium mapping features that are only available to supporting members. If you aren't already a supporting member, please consider becoming one; both to get access to these cool mapping options, but also to help keep this site running!

The map styles available are

• Default (a muted colour option that serves a wide variety of purposes)
• Light (a monochrome grey style, allowing the lines to stand out)
• Dark (colours can really pop in this one)
• Streets (a very familiar looking style - very close to what you might be used to from Google Maps)
• Outdoors (similar to Streets, but with more outdoorsy information on the map, eg.. the altitude etc)
• Bright (this has a cute wave illustration to mark the waters)
• Voyager (a vaguely historic vibe with teal waters)
• Toner (a very high contrast map with a distinct graphic style)
• Watercolour (the name says it all - your maps will look like a watercolour painting!)
• Satellite (shows satellite imagery, as the name implies)

Changing your base map style is made very straightforward.

1. While viewing the map, click on the painter's palette icon

2. Select the style you want. I'll click Toner

3. Click the Save These Settings button and you're done!

Here's a trip we did to Japan a while back shown in the Toner style. This one really looks best with really bright trip lines - yellow or red.

Other style controls

You can change a couple of other things on your map as well.

You can change the thickness of the lines.

Select your thickness.

You can change which trip lines show.

1. Untick the box to show all lines

2. Then select the ones you want

Change individual trip colours
Sometimes the default, somewhat randomly generated trip colours just don't match the basemap you have selected. You can adjust the colours of your trip lines on a trip by trip basis. This is done by editing the trip.

1. When viewing an individual trip you will see an ellipsis in the top right corner of the trip details panel. Clicking on that reveals a small menu with the option to edit the trip details.

2. On this form, there is an option to change the colour of the trip lines.

Choose your appropriate colour and save to update your trip!

That just about sums up the styling options currently (2024) available. I hope it makes it a bit easier to do. If you have any ideas on new options we could add, feel free to start a thread in the forums about it or drop us a message through the contact form.

Further reading

• How to add custom routes to your travel map
• How to add custom locations
• An overview of the travel mapping tool.