Dark greetings! We’ve been thinking a lot about dark maps in recent months (as Kelsey presented about recently at NACIS) and the thought occurred to us: how quickly could we make a nice dark mode version of Stamen’s iconic Toner style?
As you may recall, a couple years ago we created vectorized versions of our classic Toner basemaps (specifically Toner and Toner Lite) as part of our effort to modernize these styles for the 2020s. We did this using the Map GL Build System, our open-source tool that makes it possible to create and maintain several versions of the same map styles quickly and collaboratively. To explore the dark side of Toner, we revived this project last month to see how easily we could whip up a couple new variations.
So, how long did it take? The answer: not very long at all! We ended up with two dark styles – Toner Dark, a darker version of Toner Lite, and Toner Blacklite, a near-inverse of default Toner. All four styles are available now through Stadia Maps.
Toner Blacklite features black land and white water, the opposite of default Toner. To create Blacklite, we started by directly inverting Toner’s colors, then made some adjustments to Toner’s patterns so they would be visible enough on a black background. We wanted to make sure Blacklite retained the texture that really takes Toner to another level.
Toner Dark is a darker version of our monochrome data viz-friendly style Toner Lite. We’re really pleased with how nicely this transformation turned out. Dark feels like a nice basemap that we could plug and play with for any one of many data prototyping projects, and it fills in a gap in our basemap options that has been bothering us for a while.
These styles also feel easily extensible into a more colorful space by adding a hue across the entire palette. Perhaps we’ve just found our next experiment!
And finally, dark vs. dark:
Blacklite and Dark are very different despite both being dark map styles. One feels easily usable and the other a bit extreme (but then again, so is default Toner!).
We’d love to see and hear how you might use the Toners Dark in your website, app, and beyond. These new basemap options are ready to go on Stadia Maps as we speak, and we’ve enabled them as built-in options in our Maperture map comparison tool, too. Stay tuned for more on dark maps from us in the near future. Until then…bat!
