# Stamen Map Styles (Toner, Terrain, Watercolor) (スタメンの地図様式)

> 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.

- IndexStyle No.540 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/stamen-map-style
- Kind: Style · Family: Information Design · Era: 2010s–
- Mood: Technique, Play, Nostalgia
- What this family collects: Systems that shift the load from words onto symbols and placement, each designed from the outset to reach people across differences of language and reading ability.

## Defining characteristics

- 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

## 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

## Composition recipe

- Typography & lettering: 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.
- Layout & structure: 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.
- Material & texture: 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.

## Colour

Read off the reference works below, so a direction rather than a fixed palette.

- Ground: #E5C49F
- The colour it is remembered by: #7FB0C2
- Text and outlines: #111111

## What to avoid

Lay thin lines and small type over Watercolor and they lose to the soft edges and the paper grain, so nothing stays readable.

## Application checklist

Work through this before calling a piece an application of this style.

- [ ] Visible in the piece: Toner is drawn in black and white with no grey midtones at all
- [ ] Visible in the piece: In Watercolor the shore reads as the soft edge of a brush stroke, and the paper texture stays visible as you zoom
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Watercolor renders water as blues mixed with turquoise and violet, and roads swing from orange to red brown
- [ ] Visible in the piece: Labels, lines and ground are separate layers, so a tile set ships with any of them left off
- [ ] The layout follows: 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.
- [ ] The lettering follows: 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.
- [ ] The material and surface follow: 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.
- [ ] The colour relation holds: #E5C49F as ground, #7FB0C2 carrying the style, #111111 for text and outlines
- [ ] At least one reference work below has been studied directly
- [ ] The caution above ("What to avoid") has been addressed

## Related styles

- **Schematic Transit Diagram (スキーマティック路線図)** — 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. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/transit-diagram
- **Portolan Chart (ポルトラーノ海図)** — A medieval working sea chart, crossed by radiating rhumb lines. Coastlines and place names run precisely along the vellum while flags and monsters fill the empty water, from a time when a map's usefulness and its ornament had not yet parted. → https://indexstyle.org/styles/portolan-chart

## Compose it with something else

The dictionary can put this entry in a structural role and another in an accent role, and report where the two fight: https://indexstyle.org/compose?ids=stamen-map-style+transit-diagram

## Further study

- the Watercolor palette as Cooper Hewitt describes it, water in blue with turquoise and purple, terrain in pink, brown and purple, buildings in a light purple grey
- the split of derivatives maps.stamen.com lists, seven of Toner and four of Terrain
- the 2023 partnership with Stadia Maps and the rebuild onto a vector tile base

## Reference works

- Map rendered with Stamen Design's Watercolor tiles, 2022 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odin's%20Travel%20to%20Scandinavia%20according%20to%20Ynglinga%20Saga.png
- Map rendered with Stamen Design's Terrain tiles, 2016 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carte%20Archipel%20des%20Sept-%C3%8Eles.jpg
- Map using Stamen Design's black and white tiles (uMap), 2023 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5 — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bergwinkel-%C3%9Cbersicht%20f%C3%BCr%20Link%20zu%20uMap.png

## Source of record

- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum — Maptiles by Stamen Design — https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2021/10/06/maptiles-by-stamen-design/

## Machine surfaces

- JSON: https://indexstyle.org/api/styles/stamen-map-style
- Image-generation prompt (legally clean): https://indexstyle.org/styles/stamen-map-style/prompt.txt
- MCP: https://indexstyle.org/mcp (tools: search_styles, get_style, compare_styles, compose_styles, find_related_styles; prompts: image-prompt, apply-style)