You can pick a city and theme, keep the defaults, and generate a good poster. Layer controls give you more say over the composition, ranging from sparse line art to a map with buildings, paths, and labels.
Each layer contributes a different kind of information.
The individual layers
Roads
Roads provide the main structure of most maps, so Inkroads enables them by default. They let you identify Manhattan's grid or London's sprawl at a glance.
The hierarchy includes motorways, primary roads, secondary roads, tertiary roads, and residential streets. Most themes separate them by line weight, with motorways thickest and residential roads thinnest. Tokyo Night and Neon City also use color.
You can turn roads off when water or buildings provide enough structure. In Venice, the canals can carry the composition on their own.
Water
The water layer covers oceans, lakes, rivers, and canals. Coastlines create edges, rivers divide districts, and canals define neighborhoods. Water often explains why a city developed where it did.
Coastal cities such as Miami, San Francisco, and Sydney lose their defining edge without water. Inland cities may depend on a river instead, as Paris does on the Seine and London on the Thames. Our coastal cities guide has more examples.
Parks
Parks and green spaces use the fill assigned by the theme. They interrupt the road grid with areas such as Central Park's rectangle in Manhattan, the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and Hyde Park in London.
Cities without many parks change little when you toggle the layer. In London, New York, and Berlin, large parks provide visible gaps that make nearby streets feel denser.
Buildings
The building layer renders individual footprints. From a wide view, they form a texture across developed areas. A close view separates the individual structures.
On Blueprint, buildings and roads resemble an architectural site plan. Our Blueprint theme guide covers the pairing.
On dark themes like Noir or Midnight Blue, buildings add a faint, granular density to neighborhoods. The effect is subtle at normal zoom but becomes prominent in a close district crop.
Railways
Railway lines appear as dashes or dots, depending on the theme. The layer includes major rail lines, metro systems, and tram routes.
Railways are most visible in European and Asian cities with dense infrastructure. Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Paris have networks visible at city-wide zoom. North American railways often appear as finer detail.
Paths
Paths include footpaths, cycle paths, and pedestrian-only routes. They add fine detail in parks and along waterfronts.
At city-wide zoom, paths are too small to read. Zoom into a park or waterfront promenade and the network shows pedestrian movement that the roads miss.
Beaches
The beach layer adds a warm strip along sandy coastlines. It separates water from land with a third color instead of a hard edge.
The layer is useful for coastal and island cities such as Honolulu, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney. Enable water with it so the shoreline remains clear.
Labels
Labels add place and street names. They provide context, but they also add visual clutter.
On poster-sized prints, street names are hard to read from across a room. Labels make more sense on desk-sized prints, digital wallpapers, or maps of an unfamiliar city. Our minimalist map design guide explains the label-free approach.
Useful combinations
Start with one of these combinations:
The minimalist (roads only)
Turn off every layer except roads for pure urban geometry. Dark themes such as Noir, Midnight Blue, and Dracula work well with a recognizable road pattern.
The architect (buildings and roads)
These two layers create a site-plan look on Blueprint, Slate, and Ivory. Dense European cities with distinct blocks work well, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Prague.
The coastal (water, roads, and beaches)
Use these layers when the shoreline matters. Ocean, Cobalt, and Mediterranean keep land, beach, and water distinct in Miami, Honolulu, Sydney, or Barcelona.
All layers
Turn everything on for maximum information density. Themes with clear differences between layer types, such as Neon City, Aurora, and Solarized Light, keep complex cities readable. Try Istanbul, San Francisco, or Stockholm.
The garden city (parks, roads, and water)
Parks add color inside the road grid while water provides geographic context. Forest, Sage, and Nordic make the large green spaces in London, Berlin, and Portland part of the composition.
Compare before generating
The live preview in the editor updates when you toggle layers. Compare a few combinations at the final zoom level before generating.
Theme colors can separate or flatten these layers. Compare them in our theme selection guide.