Map Style — Placematic

Styles this has designed

What you get back

Showcase your website with your map

We render your own page with the new basemap dropped into the exact spot your current map occupies. Same layout, same copy, different map. Nothing to install to see it.

yourcompany.com/locations

your site

Step one

Your brand, measured from your own page

The agent opens your site in a real browser and reads the rendered page, not the CSS file. Every color is weighted by how much of the screen it actually covers, so a hover state used once does not outrank the background your customers stare at all day.

Reads computed styles after fonts and scripts have settled
Weights each color by rendered area, not by how often it appears in the stylesheet
Separates the document background from cards and sections, where most tools trip
Finds your existing map, its renderer, and where the tiles come from

#FCF5E3 surfacearea 14 660

#212121 textarea 12 767

#008A38 accentarea 6 195

#FFED00 area 22

#DDDDDD area 317

Step two

Contrast checked before it ships

A model picks the colors. A deterministic engine decides the numbers, and it refuses to hand you a map you cannot read. Labels are held to 4.5:1 against the surface, water and road casings to 1.2:1. Where a palette leaves no room, the engine corrects lightness and says so in writing.

The model never touches a value in the style file — it cannot produce an unreadable map
Tested across ten extreme palettes: dark sites, pure white, navy on yellow, neon
Every correction is reported, so you know what changed and why

City labels14.81:1

Road labels4.55:1

Region names3.05:1

Water / land lifted 6%1.34:1

Roads / casing1.32:1

Under the hood

Layers a consumer basemap does not have

These styles sit on HERE vector tiles, which carry classes built for moving freight, not for browsing. Truck-preferred routing, congestion charge areas and environmental zones are real, stylable layers — not something you overlay yourself and keep in sync forever.

Twenty-one layers, tuned per zoom, from country view down to building footprints
Verified against live tiles — not written from a schema doc and hoped for

Street.TruckPreferred · categories 0–4freight

CongestionZone · fill, outline, labelfreight

EnvironmentalZone · fill, outlinefreight

roads · highway / major / minor / rail / ferry

places · locality, thresholded by population

water · landuse · buildings · boundaries

What lands in your repo

One file. Whatever renderer you already use.

You get a Mapbox GL style spec document. Point MapLibre at it and you are done — same for Mapbox GL JS or Tangram. No SDK swap, no proprietary format, no build step. If your team already renders maps, this is a config change, not a project.

Works with MapLibre, Mapbox GL JS, Tangram, deck.gl
Still on Leaflet? Licensed raster tiles are one URL swap while you plan the move
We host and version the style, so a schema change upstream is our problem

map.js

// your renderer, your repo, one line changes
new maplibregl.Map({
  container: 'map',
  style: 'https://style.placematic.io/acme/v3',
  center: [-87.63, 41.88],
  zoom: 12
});

Why Map Style by Placematic

The map is the one screen nobody owns

Every other surface in your product got a design review. The map shipped with whatever the SDK returned by default, and it has looked like somebody else's product ever since. Here is what actually stands in the way, and what we do about it.

“Restyling the map is a sprint nobody will fund.”

Ten seconds, and the output is a drop-in file. The work that used to be a ticket is now a config change your frontend lead makes between meetings.

“Design tools give us color pickers, not judgment.”

A free editor hands you 730 tokens and no opinion. We read your brand, decide which color is the ground and which is the signal, and enforce legibility on the way out.

“Our tiles come from a free community server.”

It works until it doesn't, and it fails at the worst moment — mid-day, on the page people use to find you. These styles run on licensed HERE tiles with terms behind them.

“That means another vendor, another contract, another invoice.”

No. Placematic has been a HERE Gold Partner since 2016. We issue the key, host the style and bill you. Your team never opens a HERE account.

“A pretty map still won't show truck restrictions.”

This one will. Truck-preferred roads, congestion charge areas and environmental zones are first-class layers in the tiles, not an overlay you maintain yourself.

“What happens when the upstream schema moves?”

We regenerate from stored tokens and republish. A style that lives at a URL we maintain does not quietly break six months from now while you are looking elsewhere.

Pricing

The style is free. The tiles are metered.

Designing a style costs you nothing and you can keep the file. What costs money is serving licensed map tiles to your users, billed per transaction by HERE and passed through by us at partner rates.

Design a style

Free, unlimited, no account. Paste a URL and keep what comes out.

Full style.json, yours to download
Contrast report and the reasoning behind every choice
Works with your own renderer and your own tile key

Tiles, key and hosting

We issue the key, host the style at a URL we maintain, and invoice you. One vendor.

Licensed HERE tiles with commercial terms
Volume priced per transaction — partner rates, not list
Style versioned and regenerated when the upstream schema moves
Truck and zone layers included where your plan covers them

Tile calculator — enter your monthly map loads and see the number. Coming here.

Stop shipping somebody else's map

Paste your URL. In about ten seconds you will be looking at your own page with a map that belongs to it.

Questions & answers

The things people ask before they paste a URL

Which renderers does the style work with?

Anything that reads the Mapbox GL style spec: MapLibre GL JS, Mapbox GL JS, Tangram, deck.gl. The output is a plain JSON document pointing at HERE vector tiles. There is no SDK to adopt and no proprietary format to learn.

We are on Leaflet. Is this useless to us?

No, but it splits in two. Leaflet does not render vector tiles natively, so full brand styling means moving to MapLibre — usually a half-day for a team that already renders maps. If you are not ready, licensed HERE raster tiles are a one-line URL swap today: you lose the custom palette but you get supported tiles and predictable terms.

Do we have to open a HERE account?

No. Placematic has been a HERE Gold Partner since 2016. We issue the key, host the style and invoice you directly. One vendor, one contract, one bill — your procurement team meets us and nobody else.

What do you do with our site?

We open it in a headless browser, read the rendered colors, take one screenshot of the area around your map, and throw the page away. Nothing is stored beyond a ten-minute cache so a second click does not re-run the work. Logos and screenshots you upload never leave your browser at all — those colors are computed locally.

How accurate is the brand reading, honestly?

Good on sites with a clear palette, weaker on sites built from many third-party widgets. When it misses, you have two fallbacks: drop in your logo, or type the three hex values yourself. The engine that turns three colors into twenty-one layers is deterministic either way — only the reading step is a judgment call.

Do we have to show HERE attribution?

Yes. Licensed tiles carry a required copyright notice, and it is baked into the style we hand you. It is a line of small text in the corner of the map — the same deal every commercial map provider has, including the one you are using now.

What happens when HERE changes the tile schema?

We regenerate your style from the stored tokens and republish it at the same URL. That is the practical argument for letting us host it: a style.json you downloaded once is a file that quietly stops matching the data a year from now.

Can you just do the integration for us?

Yes. Ask for the full mockup and you get a working page with your style and your locations in one business day. Beyond that we build store locators, territory models and routing against the same data — that is the actual business, this tool is the front door.

What should your map look like?