Probably the most highly used piece of software to come out of Australia. Just in front of Samba and Rsync :-)
Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking more along the lines of exception to the rule. I honestly have some trouble finding another product by Google which has this attention to detail (design-wise), maybe Chrome...
Chrome on OSX is fantastic, my only beef being that some options are in unintuitive places. For example, 'Extensions' is under 'Window'. Why? There's a perfectly good crescent wrench just sitting by its lonesome self over there there in the corner. I've found Chrome to be the only browser that broke away from the traditional browser format, and pulled it off beautifully. By contrast, FF 3.6 on OSX is hideous.
You can get to Extensions via the crescent wrench, too. It's Wrench->Tools->Extensions.
Not at all obvious, but it's there.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be implemented with the same feature as the lack of clusters: a label suppresses other labels around it, with bigger cities suppressing more. Would be easy to do with a greedy algorithm.
It's not the implementation that surprises me - once I know it's the right thing to do, I can easily figure out a method how. What's surprising is the insight that it is the right thing to do.
Agreed, I wasn't trying to say it was hard. Mostly pointing out how two features could be the same simple mechanism.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#44A common complaint is that Google is engineer-driven rather than design driven. Some very impressive counter-evidence in the article -- lots of nice design hacks.
You're assuming they didn't arrive at these settings for borders, weight, classes of label via A/B testing of various alternatives. Google has enough resources available that for something like this it could easily substitute brute-force testing for "best-practice" design (and there's a number of arguments why that might be the better choice, including the fact that design practice seems to evolve over time.)
They would still have to think of these ideas in order to test them. Talking about 'brute-force design' implies that there is no thought involved.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome on OSX is fantastic, my only beef being that some options are in unintuitive places. For example, 'Extensions' is under 'Window'. Why? There's a perfectly good crescent wrench just sitting by its lonesome self over there there in the corner. I've found Chrome to be the only browser that broke away from the traditional browser format, and pulled it off beautifully. By contrast, FF 3.6 on OSX is hideous.
You can get to Extensions via the crescent wrench, too. It's Wrench->Tools->Extensions. Not at all obvious, but it's there.
Well now I feel like an idiot. I'm going to bullshit and say it wasn't always like that, because it took me forever to find when I first got my mbp.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#46Halos around your text are quite important if you're trying to draw titles on television, particularly the old NTSC television. You see them all the time in video games too.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#47I'm amazed that a post about such a potentially dry subject - UI/typeface on maps - is the most fascinating thing I've read today. Extraordinary well done by the author.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#48Google has better thought out color contrast too. The other ones are either too monochromatic, or the map details overwhelm the labels (think 90's web page color contrast)
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#49Am I the only one who thought the Bing maps were more "readable" than the Google maps? I do agree that the Yahoo maps were by far the worst, but to me the Bing maps were better designed (other than the color scheme) than the Google maps. Maybe it's just me?
It's just you (based on my study with n=1). I.e. I think Google Maps look way better.
Re: Why Do Google Maps’s City Labels Seem So Readable?
#50Arg, that term "pop"