A beautiful custom map is an eye-catching addition to any creative project. Practice your art-map skills with a fun project to make a special card that highlights specific locations or a special place. It’s a great fit for Valentine’s Day—or Galentine’s Day or Singles’ Awareness Day or Love Your Pet Day! 

Follow these steps to use Mapbox Studio to design a custom map and then export a high-resolution image to make a stunning, personalized card.

Login to Mapbox Studio

If you have a Mapbox account, login and navigate to Mapbox Studio in your browser. If you don’t have a Mapbox account yet, sign up to use Mapbox Studio for free.

Make a custom style

There are many ways to make a custom map style in Mapbox Studio. You can start from a template or from scratch in Mapbox Studio. Check out the Mapbox styles Gallery and copy styles to your account. Or try using Cartogram to create a map style based on the color palette of any image file then save that style to your account, where you can edit it further.

Add custom labels or icons

Want to add some special labels or icons? Try using the Dataset editor in Mapbox Studio to create points, lines, or polygons. Make a Tileset from your custom data, then add it as a layer in your Style and get creative with fonts, colors, and icon images.

Export a map image

Once you have a style that you love, use the Print panel in Mapbox Studio to download a .png or .jpeg image of the current view of your map style.

Not sure where to map? Try using location in a meaningful way. Here are a few ideas for where to center the map:

• Where you first met
• Location of your first date
• Favorite coffee shop
• Your hometown
• Dream vacation destination

Share or print

There are all sorts of ways to use your high-resolution map image! Share it digitally, share it on social media, or print it. To format your map image for printing on a greeting card, try something like this card template. 

(Remember that when using images exported from Mapbox Studio you’ll need to add in Mapbox attribution somewhere on the image, especially if you are using the images commercially.)

If you really want to get fancy, make the map interactive and add chronological events or a story using our Storytelling solution, with step-by-step instructions.