Styling with wood grain patterns and “carved” 3d terrain
By: Madison Draper
I spent my weekend in Santa Cruz, California hiking through the tall redwood forests. Etched into the trunks and branches of many trees were dedications of love with initials and dates. These carvings reminded me of Eleanor Lutz’s Woodcut style. I decided to widdle one out a woodcut style myself using Mapbox Studio.
Textures
To remake the Woodcut style, I focused on different textures to resemble different types of wood. Using the graphics from the original map, I used Image Trace with a high fidelity result.
Most of the SVGs came out over a gigabyte large! I ran the SVGs through an SVG minifier that reduced their size and uploaded them to Mapbox. I did this for each original seamless pattern from the original map. I recommend checking out our SVG guide for extra tips and tricks for preparing an SVG.
Below are the textures I used to remake Woodcut. I used varying sizes of patterns to style across zoom range.
Adding 3D contours
A defining characteristic of a woodcut is the varying relief on the wooden block. When remaking this style, Mapbox GL has the ability to render 3D shapes. Using the Mapbox Terrain V2’s contour data, I extruded the polygons to create shaded relief. I only wanted to show positive elevation, so I used the following expression that styled across the data range from 20 to 8840 meters.
Abstracting design elements
Taxonomy charts are a critical step in the map design process. The taxonomy below abstracts the primary design elements of the map. Because the world is so large, it’s nearly impossible to look at every section, so taxonomy charts help us to view and tighten the design elements of the map without its geographic context.
Add Woodcut to your account and make it your own. Control-click and drag to change the pitch and bearing of the map and explore different perspectives. Because of the soft textures and light colors, you can add data visualizations. Tweet with #mapstylemonday to let me know what you think!
Carving Woodcut was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.