Three axes, not thirty presets.

A style here is a composition rather than a filter: what the map draws, how the ground is lit, and what the whole thing is coloured with. Change one axis and you get a genuinely different poster.

What it draws

The vocabulary decides which features are worth a line. A mountain poster and a city poster are not the same drawing with a different colour — they are different maps.

Base — lakes and rivers

The water everything else sits on. Always drawn.

Mountain — paths, summits, cols and refuges

For terrain where the interesting features are the ones you had to climb to.

City — streets in three weights, water and green space

For a route whose shape is defined by the streets it followed.

How the ground is lit

The hillshade is computed from elevation data with a sun position you can move. It is an art-direction control, not a rendering detail.

Off — no relief

Flat ground. The route and the type carry the whole poster.

Soft — high sun, true scale

Shows where the steep ground is without shouting about it.

What it is coloured with

The palette is the ground, the shadow, the route and the type, as one set.

Paper — warm ground, cool shadow, orange route

Adret is the sun-facing side of a valley, so the route runs warm against terrain that runs cool.

One palette, for now

One is the honest number. Four earlier styles each carried a near-identical warm paper, differences of a couple of percent that read as drift rather than as art direction — unifying them is what makes the output look like one product. A second palette arrives when there is a genuinely different look to show: a dark poster, a cool one. Not because a vocabulary drifted.