Sketchy Maps with Geometry Smoothing | Hacker News Reader

Sketchy Maps with Geometry Smoothing

mapbox.com

97 pointsxbryanx10 comments

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Very reminiscent of the work Stamen is doing; I'm a big fan of both.

Here's Stamen's watercolor map: http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor/#12/37.7706/-122.3782

Wow! This is absolutely beautiful.

Gorgeous, but painfully slow to render. The price we pay!

I thought this was going to be the Bing napkin sketch style for directions:

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/06/bing_destination_ma...

Love the end result of the bezier curves shown on the map of the Caribbean, but really thought the napkin sketch feature was fantastic for directions.

I prefer the traditional style maps because if you deviate from the expected route you still have a map of the area.

For example a GPS device will give sometimes give you a ridiculous number of turn by turn directions in a row. Go 100 feet merge right, go 200 feet merge left, go 50 feet and take a right, go 300 feet and make a left.

As one of the comments at your link shows, this was originally developed at Stanford:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/routemaps/

There's something very pleasing about dedicating so much technical attention to something that is so artful. I love seeing map styles like this- not sure where I'd use one myself, but I sure want to...

Tangentially related, I like this really simple experiment with map simplification from a few years ago: http://adamsmith.as/blurry_maps/

Obviously not nearly as involved as this, but a nice example of what a really simple transform can do aesthetically: It just median-filters Google Maps, which has the effect of removing text, simplifying boundaries, and producing large flat color areas.

I love that slippy maps are a commodity such that people can making art and craft them in new and wonderful ways.

There's already a nice collection of other twists on the slippy-map-as-art thing here. One more is Stamen's Pretty Maps, which does the heavy lifting in SVG and combines Flickr shapefiles in very interesting way: http://prettymaps.stamen.com/

This is so beautiful.

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