The Maps of the Week

The Gaza War Map is a powerful visualization of the devastating effect of Israeli air strikes in Gaza. The map consists of a number of 360 degree panoramic Street Views taken in the Gaza Strip since the onset of the present conflict between Israel and Hamas.

You can navigate to each of the Street Views by using the thumbnail images or by selecting the markers on the map. As you pan around one of the custom Street View images a radar control on the map shows the direction of your current point of view. You can also right-click on a panorama to change the panorama's projection.


This week I also liked the Van Gogh Map, created with Mapbox GL and textures taken from Van Gogh paintings.

I originally posted the map because I thought it provided a neat example of how to add textures to map tiles in the new Mapbox GL. However the map seemed to strike a chord with Google Maps Mania readers and has been far and away the most viewed and shared map over the last seven days. For that reason alone it has to make it to this week's Maps of the Week round-up.

The map is also worthy of a second look. Since I wrote about the map on Thursday some work has been done on cleaning up the texture seams. 

If you like artistic looking maps then you might also like this Leaflet powered Fractal Map. Using the map you can pan around and zoom in on a number of beautiful fractal patterns.

The map includes a Leaflet hash library, which means that you can pan and zoom the map to find your favorite fractal patterns and then share the view by cutting and pasting the URL. The map is also a neat demo of using the Leaflet mapping platform with HTML5 canvas and Web Workers. You can explore how this is achieved on the map's GitHub page.