How I Designed a Map
A tale that spans 1600 days and 3300 km
Ch. 1: The Holy Trinity
It was January of 2016. I was trying to figure out where I would travel to next. I had a bucket list and at the top of that were the three places I most wanted to visit in the entire world — my Holy Trinity — Ladakh, New Zealand, Iceland.
Iceland got added to the list very early in my life. When I was 6, I read Jules Verne’s “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” in which the titular journey starts at Snæfellsjökull in Iceland. I had opened my atlas that evening to check if Iceland was a real country and where it was. When, a couple of years later, I heard about the Aurora Borealis and how they’d be visible from anywhere in Iceland, the country became a part of the Holy Trinity. All I had to do was wait and gather some money before I could travel there.
Back to 2016. It was now final that we would be visiting Iceland that year. I did all my research on the gear we’d need and the best time to go, and it was deemed that September was the perfect month. The problem was that September was 8 months away. I had read everything I could about Iceland and didn’t want to see too many photos of it since those could act as a spoiler, so I did the only logical thing I could do. I decided to design a map of Iceland. From scratch.
Ch. 2: The Vision
There was no real reason why it had to be a map. I just thought it would be neat to have a custom map of my travel to Iceland — like those old travel maps that came in atlases. Now, while I absolutely adored maps and had spent time collecting them, I had NO idea how to design one. How hard could it be? I’m a designer, I should be able to do this. Turns out, it’s bloody difficult.
I presumed that there could be two ways to design a map. I could look for existing maps, print them out, trace the elements I needed, scan them and upload that back into an editing tool to design however I liked. Another option was to find a service that gave me geographical data that I could style directly.
While thinking about the second option, I remembered reading about Mapbox some time back. They provided maps for a lot of apps so maybe I could use their data to customise my own?
My vision was to custom design a map of Iceland on which I could chart my trip. Maybe I’d frame it and put it on the wall to reminisce.
I did some preliminary research and found that Mapbox allowed me to choose geographical data and then style the map. Bingo! On my way home I started thinking about the map, and zeroed in on the colours I wanted to use. White and green. Ice and land. Simple enough.
The white wouldn’t be a diluted version, though. Iceland is a relatively young country (20 million years) and that lends itself to rugged, stark terrain and hence I chose the starkest white. For everything else, I’d use a soft colour palette.
Quick aside — Greenland in reality has more ice then Iceland, and Iceland is greener than Greenland, but we’ll let that slip for now.
When I got home and opened Mapbox, I realised that I had forgotten one HUGE thing in my naivety. They were a map/data provider. Which means this was a map that you could zoom in and out of, enabling anyone to customise any detail at different zoom levels. My mind was blown at the endless possibilities. This was what I’d wanted to do and some more! After all, the old atlases were stuck on a single page. My map could live and breathe. Somewhere at the back of my head a voice also asked, “Have I taken on too much?” But then I remembered I had 8 months to kill and happily dove in.
I studied Mapbox for about 10–15 days. I looked at all the possible data they provided, and how I could filter and change the data. Basically, what Mapbox let me do was select geographical data (e.g., “Select All Roads”), then filter that data further if I wanted (e.g., “Select Trunk Roads”) and style the selection. Now imagine being able to do this with ALL the geographical data — water bodies, transport infrastructure, points of interest (POIs), etc. You could apply the same colour to all landcover or give them different styles based on how you filtered it. Mapbox also had a few themes which I sat and dissected to see how colours, fonts, and sizes changed as you zoomed in and out. Mapbox gives you the ability to conditionally style data across different zoom levels, allowing you control information density very precisely. Once I was done with studying all of this, I was ready to start designing my map.
Ch. 3: The Colors
I sat down and made a rough palette. For all landcover, I chose the same green at different opacities so that when the data overlapped, they would create visual layers. For the roads, I wanted a colour contrasting the white/green landscape and chose a combination of fiery yellow and orange so it looked like a path burned on to the island. Iceland was, after all, known as the Land of Fire and Ice.
Ch. 4: The Typography
My map was coming along well, but I also wanted to change the font. In Jules Verne’s novel, it all starts with a cryptic note written in the Runic script. I wanted something similar — hard edges, geometrical lines harkening back to the Nordic style.
After a long time looking for it, I found TT Firs, designed by Ivan Gladkikh and the TypeType team. It was perfect. It came in a huge range of variants, was neutral, and most importantly, legible at smaller sizes. It gave a beautiful character to my map.
It was now time to style POIs. I grouped them by type and assigned colours. Green for nature, purple for transport, teal for water-based transport, red for medical, and orange for education. Everything else would be brown. Groups would have similar colours but different icons. Fortunately, Mapbox had a whole set of POI icons ready to be used and customised.
I thought my map was coming along beautifully. There were a few niggles here and there, but V1 was complete! The niggles were mainly at higher zoom levels, but since my final aim was to map my whole road trip, I figured it was okay if I left it at that.
The map was designed only for Iceland so the colours and information density don’t work on all countries. V1 of my map can be interacted with on my website, and you’re free to explore and play around with it. It was now May 2016 and I couldn’t plot the road trip until I was back.
Ch. 5: Dusting it Off
Four months later I went on my trip. I spent 16 days in Iceland driving 3300 km taking it all in. I hiked random trails, saw stunning waterfalls, and experienced standing under the Aurora until my fingers went numb with the cold. It was a surreal experience.
However, I forgot about the map I’d made. Flash forward 4 years. Lockdown happened and I remembered my map. I came back to it and saw that there was a new version of Mapbox which let me do in 30 minutes what took me weeks. (insert laugh crying GIF).
While I was writing this post, Mapbox released another updated version! Do they even sleep?
I estimated that it would take me even more time to learn the new version and transfer my styles there, so I stuck with the old one. All I had to do now was chart my trip onto the map. To do that, I had to map out my whole trip and every single place I went to and then learn how to use Mapbox APIs to overlay it on top of my map. Thankfully I remembered my route almost completely.
Once I had my trip details, I learnt how GeoJSON works and used that to make a tileset in Mapbox which I could then style. Tilesets are essentially geographical representations of your data. It’s actually pretty simple once you know what to do, but it took me almost a week to figure all of it out. I tried it on another map once and then ported it onto Iceland. All of it finally clicked into place.
This took a lot more effort than I originally thought it would, but my map was better for it. I learned so much about cartography and technology by making just one map. I’ve always had huge respect for cartographers but it grew tenfold after this process; imagine creating maps 400 years back! It also gave me that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you make something with your hands entirely from the ground up.
Almost 1600 days after I first began, my map was finally complete. I exported the map and made some adjustments in Photoshop to create a final static version of my road trip to Iceland — which, by the way, included going to Snæfellsjökull where it all started.
