Styles

Styles control how layers look on the map. They’re project-level objects you create once and reuse: a layer points to a style, and a view can swap that layer to a different style when it needs to.

That separation matters. If you treated styling as a per-layer concern, you’d be retyping the same colors and widths every time. Keeping styles separate means a single visual treatment can apply across half a dozen layers, and a small tweak propagates to all of them.

How styles work

Every project starts with a Default Style. From the Styles tab you can add new styles, rename or duplicate existing ones, and toggle them active or inactive.

The list also shows which layers currently use each style, which makes shared styles easier to manage as a project grows. The system Default Style always sticks around as a fallback. If a layer’s assigned style goes missing or gets disabled, the default style takes over so the map keeps rendering.

Assigning styles to layers

Layers pick up a style from the layer’s Appearance tab, but you can also assign from the Styles list directly via the row’s actions menu, which is useful when you want one style applied to several layers at once.

Point cluster layers get a small extra: a separate cluster style. That way the cluster bubbles can have their own visual identity without dragging the underlying point layer along with them.

Fill

The Fill tab is for polygon and area appearance. You can turn the fill on or off, set a fixed color, or hand color over to a dynamic rule that reads from a data field.

Use a fixed color when the fill is just a visual identity. Use a dynamic color rule when the fill should communicate something: population density, a category, a measured value.

Stroke

The Stroke tab controls outlines and line layers.

Beyond the basics (color, width, on/off), there’s a choice between sizing the line in pixels or meters. Pixel widths stay constant on screen as you zoom. Meter widths grow and shrink with the world, so a 50m road stays 50m wide. Most thematic maps want pixels; maps that represent physical width want meters. Minimum and maximum pixel widths are there to keep meter-based lines from becoming invisible at low zooms or absurdly thick at high ones.

The cap and joint roundness toggles are aesthetic: round caps look softer, sharp ones look more technical. Line billboarding tilts lines to face the camera in pitched 3D views, which is useful for routes shown over an angled map.

Points

The Points tab is the equivalent for point geometries.

Point radius works the same way as stroke width: pick pixels for screen-stable sizes, meters for world-stable sizes, and use the min/max pixel radius to bound the result. Antialiasing smooths the circle edges. Billboarding keeps points facing the camera in pitched views.

Use these settings for direct point rendering. If you’re working with dense point data and the answer is “smaller dots,” it’s often a sign you should switch to a different render mode entirely. See Layer Render Modes.

Dynamic color

Dynamic color is how a style talks to the data. Pick a field, then build the color logic on top of it.

For numeric fields, you choose between a preset color ramp or fully custom color steps. Continuous interpolation blends colors smoothly between the steps; discrete keeps each step as a flat band. The focus range and step count let you spend the full color range on the part of the data that actually matters, and there’s a separate no-data color for features missing the field entirely.

For categorical fields, each category gets a color, either pulled from a preset ramp or assigned by hand. Custom colors are worth the effort when the categories already have real-world associations (red for stop, green for go, brand colors for partners).

Because styles are shared across layers, dynamic color works best when the layers using the same style have compatible field names and types. If a layer doesn’t have the field the style references, the style falls back gracefully rather than breaking.

Dynamic line width and point radius

The same idea applies to size. A dynamic numeric or categorical mapping can drive line width or point radius from a data field.

Reach for this when magnitude or rank should be visible at a glance: thicker pipes for higher capacity, larger dots for bigger transactions. Both controls include a default value for any feature that doesn’t produce a usable match, so a single missing value won’t blow up the map.

Style overrides in views

Views don’t edit a style’s settings. They pick which existing style a layer uses for that specific published output.

So if you want one shared map with bold colors and another with a muted palette, define both as styles in the project, then have each view assign the one it wants. To change the colors themselves, edit the style. To change which style a particular shared map uses, change it on the view. For more, see Views.