Map styles

How styles work

A style is a JSON document that tells the map library how to draw each kind of feature in our vector tiles: which colour the water is, how wide a motorway is at zoom 12, which font the labels use. All ten styles share one tileset, so switching between them costs nothing and happens instantly in the browser.

To use a style, point MapLibre GL JS, Mapbox GL JS, OpenLayers or Leaflet at https://tiles.expressmaps.com/styles/STYLE.json?key=YOUR_API_KEY. The documentation has snippets for each library, and the embed generator writes the code for you.

Custom styles

Because the styles are standard MapLibre style documents, you can download any of them, edit colours, fonts and visibility in a tool such as Maputnik, and host the result yourself while still using our tiles. Business and Enterprise customers can ask us to host a custom style on our CDN.