From working in castle-like pillow forts, to fending off pool noodle attacks during conference calls, the Mapbox global team continues to find creative ways to keep their children entertained and enriched while working from home and after work.
As a mother of two little ones, working from home is one of the best perks at Mapbox. I get to work from home and have the opportunity to be with my kids during the most awesome time of their lives.
On Take Your Kids to Work Day in the year 2023, there is a new meaning to the tradition of bringing kids to work, because let’s face it, for many parents and caregivers working at a flexible, remote workplace like Mapbox, taking your kids to work has a different meaning. But it also invites us to reflect on what it means to take our kids to work - to give them a chance to learn more about what we do at work, and why.
This year, we’re repurposing the Mapbox map coloring book that we first shared at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a fun way to help parents and kids explore the world from their couch or kitchen table. (And really, coloring books are a great way for anyone to relax, regardless of age!)
How we made it
Usually, map designers use Mapbox Studio to create vibrant maps styles, spending a lot of time thinking about how to style roads, land, water, terrain, and points of interest. In our coloring sheets, the map styling is up to anyone’s imagination —and whatever art supplies you have on hand. We made a very minimalist map style that outlines roads, buildings, waterways and other features, leaving plenty of spaces for creative coloring!
For our 2023 refresh, we explored the coloring map style in new locations all around the world. If you’d also like to use our 2020 coloring book of favorite places, you can find it here.
Make your own pages
If you and your kids zoom through the coloring book, you can always add the map style to your own Mapbox account and follow these steps to export more map images for printing and coloring:
- Login to your Mapbox account (or sign up for a free account).
- Click this link to add the map style to your Mapbox Studio account. (If you’d like the original 2020 style without water shading, you can find it here.)
- Find the style in your Styles library at studio.mapbox.com
- Click on the style name to open it.
- While viewing the style, use the search bar in the upper right to navigate to different places.
- Pan (click and drag) and zoom to the perfect view. (If you want to get fancy you can ctrl + click to adjust the pitch and bearing of the map.)
- Click on the small printer icon and ‘Print’ in the upper right corner to open the print panel.
- Adjust the dimensions to fit the size of the image you want to print.
- Press ‘Print’ to download the high-resolution map image. Every account starts with 100 free print downloads.
- Locate the file in your downloads, open it, and print!
*Please note that if you want to use exported images from Mapbox Studio commercially, not just for coloring, you’ll need to add the proper Mapbox attribution to the image and connect with the Mapbox Sales team.
Share your map art
We’d love to see what your kids think of our map work! Tag us @Mapbox or use #mapbox to share your kid’s (or your own) creations on social media. Check out my fellow colleagues and their kids’ art projects that’s shared in our dedicated internal #kids Slack channel.
We hope this coloring book is a fun activity you can do with your kids, or helps them go wild through the landscapes of their imagination (and not your living room) while you’re on that video call. We can’t wait to see what you color!
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Maps feature data from Mapbox © Mapbox, OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap and their data partners, including Maxar (if applicable, © Maxar).
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