Sneak preview: Color Outline line style

Here's another sneak preview of what I've been working on for version 7.1 – another line style, this one inspired by an old map of Minsk I saw in Transit Maps of the World.

Minsk's planned extensions have a solid line that are shown in the same color, but with less opacity. Cairo's map with planned extensions looks similar, though even fainter than Minsk.

This can be seen in the featured image for this post, above – but in this example, the map maker had to create a separate color for each of the red, green, and blue lines. That won't be necessary in v7.1 with the new Color Outline line style.

The Color Outline line style is really similar to the hollow open (London overground) style, which made it fairly easy to add:

As you can see in the image above, using the Color Outline line style uses your chosen color as an outline, and applies a filter to get a slightly lighter color to fill the line.

This looks good with most colors, but it's not very useful if your starting color is very dark or very light. If it's very dark, the line might just look solid. If it's very light, the fill color will look very faint.

Still, I think the Color Outline line style looks very good for most colors, and it would make a good addition to your maps!

Here's an example of the new line style for the Washington, DC Streetcar:

I hope you like the new line style, and look forward to seeing how you use it in your maps! Be sure you're subscribed to free email updates to make sure you're the first to know when version 7.1 is released: