A clean point-of-interest icon set for web cartography | Hacker News Reader

A clean point-of-interest icon set for web cartography

mapbox.com

130 pointstortilla18 comments

So I quickly ran the icon set through http://icomoon.io/app and the icon font it produced seemed pretty good http://dl.dropbox.com/u/138393/maki.zip

Wow, that site is a better find than the OP, now I can easily use those raw icons designers post every so often.

Thanks. I'd never heard of that site until now. Absolutely brilliant.

Using scroll for zoom in web maps is a horrific UI choice. Nice enough icons, although I'm not a designer.

Really? That's what Google Maps and Bing Maps does...

Sure, but they are usually on a page with almost no other content (maps.google.com and whatever the Bing URL is). This page has content that I might want to scroll down to and the scroll zoom in the map makes that more difficult.

Good point. I guess I've grown accustomed to random things on the page stealing scrolling functionality (e.g. Flash/plugins, which I've disabled now) so I usually don't try to scroll unless the mouse is on the background somewhere.

Yes! Me too. Same with focus - I often find myself subconsciously clicking the background of a page to defocus whatever the page's developer or browser has decided should be focused. Flash is definitely (or at least used to be) the worst offender.

I agree, it's leaflet's default behavior and I don't think it should be. Easy to disable though.

Looks good! Except for the pharmacy symbol. That information is sometimes needed in emergencies, and what you currently have was totally unrecognizable. Make it the same as hospital, or very similar?

Some other things to improve: prison sign looks like railway crossing, college cap (?) would look stupid in many locales where there is no cap or different design, embassy and bank icons were difficult to figure out. Likewise for the minefield.

Yep, pharmacy symbol is unrecognisable to me too. Unfortunately, there isn't really an internationally recognised symbol. In some countries, the recipe symbol (℞) is used; in others, a green cross; in others still, the Bowl of Hygieia.

Inclusion of a landmine icon is interesting, but a generic skull and crossbones may help communicate the level of danger more universally. Otherwise very nice icons.

It looks like a crown to me.

Nice! Last time I looked, the set created for OpenStreetMap [1] was the only freely licensed icon set I could find, so it's nice to have more options. The OSM set is also not manually designed to be pixel-perfect at each size (the SVG form is canonical, and specific sizes rasterized from that).

[1] http://www.sjjb.co.uk/mapicons/introduction

As the main designer behind Maki, I'd love for it to be comprehensive enough to replace the standard OSM set someday. If not on the main OSM map, at least in the editors. I have a long way to go!

I've seen a lot about mapbox recently and I must say I'm very impressed, love the design of their websites in particular and of course their product seems to be pretty cool. Have any of you guys tried it? I might give it a go the next chance I get..

This is the first I've seen of MapBox. I'm not sure of how much use I'll get out of these icons, but my mind is percolating with possibilities for creating useful embeddable maps...

The "beer" glass is to generic (I think). Why not a standard beer glass?

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