30 Days of Maps Day 7 - Vintage style

Today is day 7 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is Vintage style - Map something modern in a vintage aesthetic. Create a map that captures the look and feel of historical cartography but focuses on a contemporary topic. Use muted colors, fonts, and classic elements.

There were a number of ways I considered tackling this challenge. The first was to head over to Mapbox Studio as Icon Map Pro supports Mapbox Studio styles. However, I thought it would be good to see what I could achieve without relying on third-party integrations. So instead I've achieved the vintage style by firstly placing an image of a canvas as the background for my Power BI report. I generated this using Chat GPT. I then added Icon Map Pro to the report and set the visual background to Off. This doesn't immediately have any effect, but in the background map options, you can change the transparency. So I chose our monochrome "Toner (no labels)" style and set its transparency to around 70 percent. That means that the normally white areas of the map show the map canvas, and the black water and infrastructure areas are shown in a dark brown. I feel this gives a nice vintage appearance.

Then on top of this I added a feature layer of listed buildings from Historic England's Open Data Hub. This is loaded directly from their servers using our ArcGIS integration and displayed in a transparent blue colour, so you still get some of the canvas effect. Then finally I applied tooltips - data sourced directly out of the ArcGIS layer to show the name of the building. I chose a serif style font, and set the transparency of the tooltip so the canvas shows through a little.

Finally I added the London Boroughs as a shape layer, so it's possible to zoom into a specific London Borough using a Power BI slicer - which again through transparency options on the shape layer is highlighted on the map.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.