Three New Style Editor Basemaps
Three New Style Editor Basemaps
Nick blogged previously regarding three of our signature map styles – “Pale Dawn“, “Midnight Commander” and “Fresh” – that we launched along with our Developer Programme last month. Today we’re pleased to announce that all three styles are now available for customization in our Style Editor.
Our Style Editor lets you tweak, change and configure the cartography of our maps to suit your needs. Perhaps you, as I do, love the Pale Dawn style as originally created by Stamen Design, but want to see if it looks better with a bit more emphasis on parks and public transport? So I fired up the Style Editor, and a few clicks later had this attempt – “Fair Sunrise”:
We’re always interested in what creative things you can make with our tools, so if you’ve made a style that you’re proud of please share a link in our comments. I’ll let you decide for yourself whether you think “Fair Sunrise” is an improvement!
Three New Style Editor BasemapsMarch 26th, 2009 - Posted by Andy Allan in api, cloudmade, developers, products, tools | | 2 Comments
on March 27th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Is there a reason why the oblique/italic text looks a bit wonky? I would have thought it would be something a proper designer would have brought up as I know some will avoid italics on the web because standard browser and OS settings will mangle them.
Rendered images shouldn’t have to worry about that though so is it the fonts, the rendering software, or simply unavoidable in text of this size, rendered at odd angles and overlaid on different colored backgrounds?
Compared with Mapnik, I’d say Google maps look just slightly better overall but are also less consistent so can look noticeably worse when the text is at an angle.
Microsoft maps, which I don’t normally look at are an even more extreme example of this, standard horizontal text looks very nice, but it goes to pieces on winding and angled roadnames.
Osmarender has stronger text but seems to lack a mechanism for blending with backgrounds and has some extremely small text too.
So maybe no-one does it because it’s simply impossible (though my browser seems to do okay, at least with black on white text at similar sizes) or perhaps people have just become used to looking at the text as rendered by Windows and not even looked into potential improvements.
on April 1st, 2009 at 8:56 pm
Interesting comments on the text rendering Dave. I’m not a fonts expert myself, but I suspect that the interaction of the letters with their halo backgrounds on a fairly noisey background may be the cause of some unpleasantness. Whilst I wouldn’t want to say it’s “unavoidable”, I think it might well be a tricky problem to get to the bottom of.