Tangram is Mapzen’s open-source graph­ics ren­der­ing en­gine for dig­i­tal maps. By tap­ping into a de­vice’s graph­ics card, Tangram of­fers de­sign­ers and car­tog­ra­phers full con­trol over de­sign, an­i­ma­tion, and in­ter­ac­tiv­ity.

The en­gine is pro­grammed with a plain text “scene file.” With Tangram Play, a fully-fledged text ed­i­tor is in­te­grated with a run­ning in­stance of the Tangram li­brary, so that de­sign­ers can edit the scene file and watch as their changes take ef­fect im­me­di­ately.

Initially de­vel­oped as an in­ter­nal tool, it re­ceived at­ten­tion from early adopters and watch­ers of Mapzen’s open source pro­jects. In 2017, we of­fi­cially launched the beta ver­sion as an of­fi­cially-sup­ported Mapzen prod­uct with free map host­ing, and is de­signed to be the best way to learn Tangram.