Saturday, July 02, 2016

New Walkabout & Neighbourhood Map Styles


Mapzen and Thuderforest have both released new map styles built upon OpenStreetMap data.

Mapzen's new Walkabout map style is designed specifically with walkers and hikers in mind. It emphasizes walking paths, hiking trails and outdoor attractions. These walking related features are further enhanced on the map by highlighting them at all levels of zoom.

Important to the design is a set of new map icons. Outdoor related icons are colored blue-green to help emphasize outdoor related locations over other points of interest on the map which use more muted grey colored icons.  These outdoor related icons are used on the map to draw attention to features like parks, beaches, ski resorts, campgrounds, picnic sites, restrooms, trailheads, peaks, waterfalls, dog parks, and outdoor supply stores.

Important to the Walkabout map style is detailed hill shading, which uses Mapzen's global elevation tiles.


Thunderforest's new Neighborhood map style is a general purpose map style which is designed to work particularly well when zoomed in on local areas.

Street labels are condensed in this new map style to show as many street names as possible. Clear place labels are used on an uncluttered background to ensure that these street labels and other location labels are easily legible on the map.

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