Introducing Mapbox Studio Classic
By Young Hahn
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Mapbox Studio Classic, our open source map design platform, launches today across all desktop platforms; OS X, Windows and Linux. Studio allows anyone to design radically custom maps, easily work with huge global datasets, publish updates in seconds, and design with resolution independence from retina devices to high resolution printing.
It’s the first map design application built from the ground up using vector tiles, providing a new level of design control and interaction, all while being more performant — lighter and faster on any mobile app and web site. Now you can style maps faster, your data simply scales, and everything renders sharper than ever before.
Editing Mapbox Outdoors, one of the example styles included with Mapbox Studio Classic.
Instant access to big data
Studio gives you immediate access to Mapbox data. Use the OpenStreetMap-based Mapbox Streets to style roads, highways, parks, buildings, local venues and more. Create and customize elevation contours and hillshades to visualize natural geography with Mapbox Terrain. Take full control over the color balance, saturation and contrast of satellite and aerial imagery using Mapbox Satellite.
These datasets and your own custom vector tiles are available without massive downloads or huge imports by streaming vector tiles directly into Studio using your Mapbox access token. We manage all the data on our platform, providing live updates every minute to all our global data sets, and serve maps fast wherever you are in the world.
Some of the custom styles included with Mapbox Studio Classic that you can use as a starting point.
Radical design tools
Studio lets you combine different datasets into the same map and style them seamlessly as if they were one. You can use the same CartoCSS styling language created for TileMill by the Mapbox team with capabilities unlocked by vector tiles. Merge raster and vector layers and blend between the two using advanced compositing effects. Iterate quickly on different styles to create the best possible map designs.
Retina
Deploying a Mapbox Studio Classic style takes seconds and comes ready to serve billions of tiles globally at multiple resolutions. Vector tiles allow the Mapbox API to serve @2x 512x512 tiles automatically for retina devices without any additional effort. The same resolution independence powers the hidpi image export in Mapbox Studio Classic for making print-ready maps at up to 600dpi.
High end cartography
Start publishing up to 5 custom styles with Mapbox Studio Classic on the Mapbox Standard plan for $49/month. Download Mapbox Studio Classic now and use it free for 30 days.
