The City Map element draws a street map of a place you choose, in a style you choose. It is the element behind hometown posters, wedding venue prints and “where we met” gifts. This guide takes one from an empty canvas to a product a shopper can personalize.
Add the map and pick the place
Add the element
Open Elements in the icon rail and click the City Map tile. A map lands in the centre of your print area, already selected, with its settings panel on the left.
The map starts on Amsterdam. That is a starting value, not a placeholder: it is what prints if nobody changes it.
Search for the place
Under Place, type into the search. Results come from a catalogue of cities that ships with Composerie, so this works on every plan with nothing to set up and no key.
Pick a result and the map re-centres on it.
Or type coordinates
For somewhere the city search does not know, such as a specific beach or a family farm, click Fine-tune under the search. Fill in Latitude and Longitude in decimal degrees.
Setting a coordinate by hand clears the city label, because the map no longer stands for the city you searched.
Frame the view
View, under Content on the Design tab, shows how the map is framed now, for example “Zoom 12 · 15° · tilt 30°”. To change it, click Adjust, or double-click the map on the canvas. A bar appears under the map, and you frame it directly without moving the element itself:
- Drag to move the map. Zoom in and Zoom out, or the scroll wheel, decide how much of the city fits. Low zoom levels show a region, high ones show a few streets. A city poster usually reads best around the level where main roads are visible but street names are not.
- The rotate button turns the map in 15° steps. Useful when a coastline or a river sits at an awkward angle for a portrait print.
- The tilt button leans the map away from flat, to 30° and then 60°. A small tilt gives a sense of depth; a large one makes labels hard to read in print.
Click Done when the map is framed. The keyboard works too: the arrow keys pan, + and − zoom, R turns, T tilts and Esc finishes.
Choose the look
The Look section on the Design tab is where the map stops looking like a map application and starts looking like a print.
Every look sits in one gallery. Filter it to Realistic styles, which look like a navigation map, Artistic styles, which are more graphic, or Poster colours, flat high-contrast palettes made for printing large. Looks you saved yourself sit under Yours.
Below the gallery you can change the map yourself:
- Map colors sets Water, Land, Roads, Parks, Buildings, Labels and Background one at a time, and the canvas shows each change as you make it. The switches below it, Place names, Roads and Buildings, are how you get a clean poster with only water and land.
- Marker puts a point on the location. Choose Pin, Dot, Heart or Star, or None for no marker, and set its colour with the swatch at the end of the row. To move the pin off the exact spot, drag it on the canvas while you adjust the view.
- Shape crops the map to a Circle, a Heart, a Star, a Hexagon, or Custom: an image you supply.
- Edge and Glow add a border and a glow around that shape.
- More holds the marker’s Outline and Marker size, the navigation style and the country highlight.
When you have colours you want to reuse, click the Save current tile at the end of the gallery, name the look and click Save. It appears under Yours for every map element in your account. Reset puts the look’s own colours back.
Decide what the shopper can change
The Personalize tab turns a design into a product. Switch on Customers can change this, then choose what the shopper may change.
Under What customers can change there are four switches, and they are independent:
- Place gives the shopper the city search. It is on from the start, and it is what makes this a product rather than a poster of one city.
- Move the map lets shoppers drag and zoom inside the frame to compose it themselves. It follows Place unless you set it yourself.
- Zoom exposes the zoom level as a control on its own. Off from the start.
- Look lets shoppers pick a different look. Off from the start, which is usually right: a consistent style is what makes your shop’s prints recognisable. Switch it on and Looks they can pick appears below, where you choose the looks on offer.
Add a caption that fills itself in
Linked text, under Content on the Design tab, adds a text layer that reads the map’s own location. Add the City field and the caption says “Amsterdam”; when a shopper changes the map to Lisbon, the caption follows. There are fields for City, Region, Country, Coordinates and Address.
Full list and syntax: Auto-filling captions from an element.
Where the credit line lives
A city map draws on OpenStreetMap data, and Composerie shows the credit once below the canvas here, and once under the shopper’s preview in the customizer.
It belongs to the workspace rather than to the poster: it does not move when you pan or zoom, it is not a layer, and it is not drawn into the exported print file. If the credit has to appear on the physical item for your market or your own licence, add it yourself as a text layer inside the design. See credits on a smart element.
Next
To build a whole product around it, follow a city map print.
Travel Map does the same job for a journey between several cities, and Route Map for a recorded GPS track.