For a long time, making highly stylized maps has been an extremely manual process with tedious Photoshopping or drawing using Illustrator, but beautiful and accessible map creation is becoming a reality with Map Stack from Stamen. Stamen’s excellent team is up to their usual fantastic cartographic remixing with this new tool for creating visually stylized maps. The tool is very similar to the Photoshop layers palette, with controls for masking, opacity, blend mode, coloration, and order. The beauty of the system is that the available layers come from the Open Street Map API, so you have no data to load in, and all the hard work is done already.

One thing that’s striking when you actually use Map Stack is how quickly you can experiment. Change a color, toggle a blend mode, zoom in or out—there’s none of that grinding slowness where you’re waiting for a layer to re-render, or fumbling through endless menus, like with traditional design software. It’s as if they finally brought cartography into the same kind of playful space as, say, using Instagram filters—except with a lot more substance. If you’ve ever given up on making a custom map because the tools were too daunting, Map Stack’s immediacy is a little bit addictive, honestly.

The tool really lets you focus on getting the visual qualities you want out of a map, instead of struggling with all the tedious details of creation. After creating the map, Map Stack generates an image for you to share or download for use in something else.

There’s a bit of fun, too, in trying out combinations that shouldn’t work but somehow do—throwing brash neons on top of old-school linework, or using opacity in ways most people wouldn’t dare. It almost invites a kind of irreverence that makes designing maps feel like low-stakes experimentation again. I found myself making weird color mashups just to see what happened, and sometimes the results were surprisingly good. Maybe not always “publication ready,” but definitely a lot more inspiring than staring at a menu of default choices in GIS tools.

They are still unclear on the future of the application because it generates immense quantities of data. In the first day alone it created over 10GB of data. The service currently has hours from 11am to 5pm PST on weekdays, and you can follow @mapstackStamen for updates on its availability. Here’s to hoping they keep it around and turn it into an API for creating highly stylized interactive maps.   Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure

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