Stamen Map Styles (Toner, Terrain, Watercolor) vs Schematic Transit Diagram
スタメンの地図様式 / スキーマティック路線図
Both sit in Information Design, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is style and the other layout. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Stamen Map Styles (Toner, Terrain, Watercolor)
Stamen Design published three named basemap styles: Toner in high contrast black and white, Terrain built from hill shading and vegetation colour, and Watercolor made of washes with soft edges over paper texture. What changed with them is that the look of a basemap became a style you pick, not a set of colour settings you adjust. Cooper Hewitt acquired Watercolor, which was launched in 2012 and released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.
Schematic Transit Diagram
Discards geographic accuracy for horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines with evenly spaced stations. Beck's 1933 London Underground diagram established it as the common language of transit maps worldwide.
| Stamen Map Styles (Toner, Terrain, Watercolor) | Schematic Transit Diagram | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2010s– | 1933– |
| Family | Information Design | Information Design |
| Kind | Style | Layout |
| Cues | Toner is drawn in black and white with no grey midtones at all / In Watercolor the shore reads as the soft edge of a brush stroke, and the paper texture stays visible as you zoom / Watercolor renders water as blues mixed with turquoise and violet, and roads swing from orange to red brown / Labels, lines and ground are separate layers, so a tile set ships with any of them left off | Lines limited to 45 degrees / Evenly spaced stations / Color-coded lines / Independence from geography |
| Best used for | When the basemap has to drop to black and white so strong colour can be layered on top of it · When a location map on an invitation or a guide should read as a painting on paper rather than a data panel | Reducing a complex network to what riders need, stations and interchanges · Showing a process or line where order matters more than geography |
| Type | Keep labels out of the basemap and add them back as a separate layer only when needed. Use one typeface and change its size by one step per zoom level. | Set station names at one constant angle in a single face and size |
| Composition | Hold the same map as three layers: ground, lines, labels. Drop layers as the data on top gets denser, so the map itself carries less. | Only horizontal, vertical and 45 degrees, even spacing, widened where stations crowd |
| Material | Draw Toner as two values with no midtone. For Watercolor, scan washes painted on real paper and map them onto tiles through a scripted process, keeping the soft edges and the grain. | One color per line, white circles for interchanges, plain background behind |
| Caution | Lay thin lines and small type over Watercolor and they lose to the soft edges and the paper grain, so nothing stays readable. | Trying to keep a little geographic accuracy breaks the angle rule, and the diagram ends up neither accurate nor easy to read. |