Stained Glass World | Fall 2025

For this Mapbox tileset, I was drawn to style it after the look of stained glass. I was drawn to this style because of the vibrant colors that can be seen in stained glass and the different textures of the glass. I was especially excited to stylize this tileset to highlight the naturalistic features through color, texture, and surrounding context features of borders and type.

Within the design of this map, I chose to symbolize borders and boundaries in either black or copper. This choice goes back to the stained glass inspiration where the black represents set borders and boundaries and the copper represents boundaries that are not soldered and therefore, not set in place. In application, the borders between water and land features were symbolized in black while administrative borders and roads were symbolized by copper. I made this choice as a way to highlight the more solidly defined boundaries that land and water create while emphasizing the way administrative borders are something that can be seen as in progress, never truly set borders.

Textures were drawn by hand in Procreate. More fluid and rounder textures were created for the natural features compared to more flat textures for the built features. The typefaces chosen mirror the styles used in religious stained glass, using a yellow fill with a black outline. Going further in the differentiation between the natural and built features, a more fluid and loose script typeface was chosen for the natural features and a more rigid serif typeface was chosen for the built features.

Want to explore this tileset yourself? Check it out here!