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Google Maps Style Editor: Step-By-Step (Tutorial)

Learn how to use the Google Maps Style Editor to create totally customized map styles.

Aug 17, 2022
Steve Benjamins
Google Maps Style Editor: Step-By-Step (Tutorial)

Today I am going to walk you through Google Maps Style Editor (previously Styling Wizard) so that you can confidently customize the default map style:

You can create styles like these for your custom Google Maps.

Technically you don't have to use Style Editor to create new styles — you could always embed JSON style declarations in your code — but Style Editor is a tool that makes custom styles much simpler and more intuitive.

You can find Style Editor in Google Cloud:

Style Editor is a the easiest way to create custom map styles.

Now even though Style Editor is the simplest way to create custom map styles, it still can be intimidating and confusing.

I've spent hours and hours exploring Style Editor for Atlist— our easy to use tool for creating custom Google Maps— and in this tutorial I'm going to share everything you need to know to get up and running with Style Editor.

Let's go!

The Basics of Style Editor

Note: You can skip this section but I recommend reading it if you are new to Style Editor. Understanding the basics will save you a lot of time in the long run.

To start, there are features and elements.

Features and elements.

A road is an example of a feature. The road feature is made up of elements such as icon, text, fill and stroke.

So a feature (road) has many elements (icon, text, fill and stroke).

A road is a feature with elements like stroke, fill, text and icon.

Both features and elements can be customized with stylers such as color, visibility and weight.

These are examples of stylers.

So we have features, elements and stylers.

And that is the basics of Style Editor!

Don't Make This Mistake

Here's a common mistake: let's say you want to style the road feature.

You might decide to select the road feature and change the color styler — but this is a common mistake!

Notice what happens (below) when we change the color styler on the road element? All the elements (icons, text, fill and stroke) on the road also changed their color!

This is a common mistake: we styled the road feature instead of styling individual elements.

So instead of styling the road feature, you'll want to be more precise and style an individual element of the road — such as the fill element:

Much better!

Tip: Black & White Maps, The Simple Way

The simplest possible way to create a black and white map is to select All Features and turn down the saturation styler to -100:

Turn your map to black and white.

Tip: Don't Change Text Color (Change Stroke & Fill)

Want to change the text color? Your instinct might be to select the text element.

Unfortunately that's a mistake — though a very understandable mistake. Styling the text element will change both the the stroke and fill element, which results in messy-looking text:

Don't style the text element — instead style the stroke and fill.

Instead you'll want to style the fill and stroke elements individually:

Much better!

Tip: Turn Off All Icons

Holy icons Batman!

The default Google Maps style includes A LOT of icons. Too many for most maps.

That's too many icons!

So one of the first things I'll often do is go to all features and turn off the icon element:

Much better!

From there I can always add icons back in that I want — for example, transit icons:

Notice the blue transit icons are back?

This is actually a good principle to follow: start with general styles and get more specific.

Tip: Changing Landscape Colors

Here's how I style the landscape: I style the fill element of three different features:

1. Landscape - Human Made:

Human-made landscape.

2. Landscape - Natural:

Now with natural landscape.

3. Points of Interest:

Notice how all the green parks are now a light purple?

Landscape features look best with low-contrast fills — high contrast will look jarring.

Tip: Change All Text Color

The default Google Map style gives text different colors — for example, neighbourhood text is black and park text is green:

Parks have green text and neighbourhoods have black text.

If you'd like all text to have the same color, customize the color styler on the text - fill element for all features:

Now all text is black! 

Tip: Understand Inheritance

It's important to understand that there is a hierarchy: more specific features will overrule more general features.

This hierarchy is called inheritance.

So for example, let's turn off the visibility styler on the road feature:

Roads are turned off.

Nice.

Now there is a child feature of road called highway. Highways are not currently showing because the highway feature inherited the visibility styler from the road feature.

But if we turn on the visibility styler for the highway feature, it will overrule the visibility styler for the road feature and highways will become visible:

Highways are not showing while roads are still not.

This is why features are organized with indents — to show the hierarchy of inheritance:

These indents show hierarchy.

Tip: Look for the Blue Dots

These blue dots are life savers:

They tell you where stylers have been set — so keep an eye on them. They can be a helpful way of debugging! 

Tip: Use Colors (Not Saturation)

Google documentation suggests you use the color styler instead of the saturation, hue or lightness stylers.

Use the color styler — not saturation or lightness.

Here's why: saturation and lightness are just changes to the default Google Maps style — so saturation is just turning down the saturation on the default map style. If Google ever updates the default map style, your map style will be updated too! 

So always use the color styler if you want your map style to be unchanging.  

Tip: Add Brand Colors (The Easy Way)

An easy way to add brand colors is to adjust the hue styler.

Unfortunately the hue styler is not available in Style Editor any more.

Fortunately it IS still available in the Snazzy Maps Style Editor— a third party style tool that works very similar to Style Editor.

Adjusting the hue styler on all features is the most basic way to match your style to a brand color:

Hue is a simple way to apply your brand color.

Tip: If you want to go a step further, adjust the gamma styler to really dial in the contrast.

Key Takeaways

Thanks for reading!

Style Editor seems intimidating until you understand the basics — it gets much easier after that!

If you found this helpful you might also be interested in Atlist — a tool we created that makes it easy to create custom Google Maps with multiple markers.

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