Sometimes, our customers needed a different background for their maps. Sometimes, they didn't want any label on them. Sometimes, they really wanted those lines to be ticker, while those other ones to be red.
Sometimes, those customer didn't know how to use code to do implement those changes themselves, so they had to rely to our Consultancy team. However, not everyone on the team is a programmer, and, even if, they always thought the amount of work needed for these tasks was disproportionate compared to the final goal.

That's when we, at Ordnance Survey, started working on the Map Style Editor. It was rough, only a POC, about to enter Alpha, but internal users were trying it and enjoying it. That's what they've been needed all along. A no-code webapp to edit stylesheets live while interacting with the map, to then be able to export and/or share them.

Then, the Roadmap changed and Map Style Editor was shelved.

However, the idea was out there and I thought it was too good to simply let that be forgotten.
Enters Map Fashionista, my free open source take on it. It follows similar principle, albeit using OpenStreetMap data as well as being a local-first.

This talk is going to be about the journey I went through, from the inception of Map Style Editor to the rise of Map Fashionista. However, code, images and a demo of the latter only will be shown for copyrights reasons.