Texture
Texture is an added bonus in your map design toolkit. It represents the perceived surface quality of a design piece. Patterns can be added to map features to differentiate or blend elements. They can also stand independently as a texture for the map or full background patterns.
Textures need to be seamless us properly apply them to your maps in Mapbox Studio. A seamless texture is an image or pattern that can be placed side-by-side with itself without creating a noticeable boundary between two copies of the image.
Adding an aged texture
The Vintage map style below was designed to mimic the look and feel of traditional printed maps. Then the pattern is applied to the land and bathymetry custom data added to the map style. Layer-by-layer was added at a very low opacity with slightly different color tints to get this effect.
Dark brown dot pattern is meant to add subtle texture to the water and is added layer-by-layer at low opacity for effect.
64x64px.svgtexture applied to the Vintage map style.
Adding a pop art feel
The Whaam! map style employs bright, playful patterns to show both texture and evoke the feeling of this pop art inspiration. The entire water feature is filled with a blue dot pattern. Landuse polygon features are all classified separately with a green striped pattern and are slightly transparent. This allows for areas with overlapping landuse types to appear darker showing elevation and hill shading in the land.
A contrasting blue dot pattern applied over light blue water and vibrant, green line texture for park-type land use.
32x32pxtexture applied to water for the whaam! map style
32x32px.svgpattern applied to greenspace land use for the whaam! map style