I’m laying out a neighborhood flood map in QGIS and I’m torn between Web Mercator for easy tiles and UTM 15N for distances that mean something. At 1:10,000, the visual hierarchy — road casings, curved labels, and a five-step blue depth ramp — holds together better in UTM, but I miss the crisp tiled context. What do you use for small-area print maps so the design reads cleanly without misleading scale and distance?
For small-area prints I set the project to UTM 15N and bake the XYZ basemap into a static raster at 1:10,000 so it’s stable in print… In QGIS I save the tiles then Warp (reproject) to UTM and park it under the road casings and your ‘five‑step blue’ ramp — , the slight resampling blur is the only downside. If that bugs you, @OP, switch to a vector basemap (e.g., OpenMapTiles) rendered in UTM: https://openmaptiles.org.
I ditched XYZ for vector tiles so the basemap stays razor-sharp in UTM 15N; in QGIS (Vector Tiles/MapTiler), labels and road casings scale cleanly at 1:10,000. If you’re stuck with raster tiles, grab them at 2x resolution and gdalwarp to EPSG:26915 with Lanczos — keeps the ‘crisp tiled context’ without muddying your five-step blue ramp.