Introducing draft styles
New workflows in Mapbox Studio for better maps, faster
By: Jaime Chen
To improve style management, collaboration, and iteration speed we’ve introduced a draft editing workflow, which lets you share draft styles before they’re ready for production.
The separate draft and production workflows replace the previous Studio workflow which required you to publish a map style to production in order to see your edits reflected in your web or mobile application or to share that style with someone without them logging into your Mapbox account.
With draft styles, you are now able to iterate on a style in a development environment — a critical step in the design process — before publishing to production. This change will help design teams organize and manage their map styles better, improving design efficiency.
It’s very common for users to have multiple versions of the same map style so that they can test a few different implementation ideas, but previously, there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure in Studio to support this workflow. With the new draft map styles and production map styles, you can now create a draft style when you want to continuously iterate on different style ideas, then when you are ready to ship your style in a production application, you can turn that draft style into a production style and instantly publish it to your application.
Read more in our documentation, and let us know what you think of draft styles by tagging @mapbox on twitter.
This is one of three updates to Mapbox Studio being released this week to improve your design workflow and help you create better maps, faster. We’ve also launched Style Generator & Monochrome Map Style to provide a better starting point for customizing a map, and a Streamlined Style Editor that provides maximum screen real estate when designing a map.
