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New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

maps.stamen.com

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Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#21

Post by scq »

kubrickslair wrote: post #14

Loved the watercolor tile. And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images. I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I wi…

I think this is how they are doing it:

1. Smooth the vector shapes (I'm not sure exactly how they're doing this. A blur and cutoff perhaps?)

2. Use the smoothed shapes as a mask over repeating colored watercolor textures.

3. Composite the various layers

They also seem to be applying a shadow underneath land masses.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#22

Post by kalleboo »

lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

Does anyone know how much disk space a map tile set of the whole world takes up? It obviously depends wholly on zoom levels, etc, but if anyone has done this themselves I'd love to hear more about their experience.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#23

Post by slig »

untog wrote: post #8
lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

Once everyone uses OSM, won't it be prohibitively expensive for a non-profit to serve it? Yes. The problem is that Google has started charging now as well- at least, once you hit a certain threshold. They might have a deal available for non-profits, I'm not sure. It's certainly something I'd hope MapBox are working on, because non-profit mapping seems like a large (and worthwhile area). No doubt, the bandwidth costs…

> (...) which makes it about as cheap as possible.

Have you tried Cloudflare?

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#24

Post by ghshephard »

wmf wrote: post #13
magicalist wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if the 'they' in your statement is referring to OSM or a hypothetical non-profit, but, if OSM, they've always done this, I believe. There are plenty of big users of OSM based tiles that would easily take down the OSM servers, so they have to either host their own or use some third-party to do so (MapQuest is surprisingly popular here, since they have capacity to spare and they'll serve OSM tiles up to…

Ah, I see they're ahead of me. But that policy is pretty vague about what heavy use means.

If you are a commercial provider, you can expected to be held to tight standards regarding your definitions. A not-for profit gets a lot more leeway, and "heavy use" is about as specific as OSM needs to get. If you are wondering whether you are crossing the line from "reasonable" to "heavy" use, just assume you've crossed it and make an effort to move your traffic onto your own tile server.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#25

Post by asmosoinio »

vidarh wrote: post #19
lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

"Everyone" won't ever use OSM - its license is prohibitively restrictive for a lot of uses. It's great for anyone that don't want to combine it with data they can't release, but for anyone that needs to mash it up with proprietary data, it's a non-starter by design. I think a lot of people don't realize this, as I've seen more than one company use OSM data in ways that either puts them in conflict with the license or…

Could you point to the part of the OSM license that says this?

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#27

Post by sad_panda »

noduerme wrote: post #15

Really, gorgeous work. The "Toner" version is really well done and incredibly useful for anybody who needs to laser print / xerox a ton of maps. I can tell the server's choking right now so I'm going to stop playing with it, but I wanted to say the design choices here are truly excellent in balancing level of detail with readability. Great job.

Really? In that tileset, bodies of water are like toner cartridge death. I bet my printouts will start looking banded and faded after a few dozen pages of it.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#28

Post by kubrickslair »

scq wrote: post #21
kubrickslair wrote: post #14

Loved the watercolor tile. And a plea to HN folks: I am working on a project, and it will be great if someone can point me to a way to dynamically apply such a filter to vector derived solid color images. I am thinking of running a GIMP server, but I find the plugins available limiting. I have very limited image processing experience, and this was not a major part of the product, so had put it on the backburner. I wi…

I think this is how they are doing it: 1. Smooth the vector shapes (I'm not sure exactly how they're doing this. A blur and cutoff perhaps?) 2. Use the smoothed shapes as a mask over repeating colored watercolor textures. 3. Composite the various layers They also seem to be applying a shadow underneath land masses.

Thanks! I did not think of smoothing the vector shapes, that partially explains how it blends so well.

The other thing is the edges of the shape- they are darker and blend in the lighter body of the fill. I guess that works by inverting the shapes, blurring, and using that as a mask for a different more intense blend.

And in both cases, I see there is some cool randomness going on. I see how I may be able to handle it for the latter- through a texture etc., but not sure how to handle the randomness in shape creation.

Also, it would be great if someone can suggest a good library to implement this. I am currently using Processing to render the image, but it may not be the best way for these set of procedures. The other image processing libraries I found were not high level enough.

PS: I have a hunch that their textures are not monochromatic. They seem multicolored and they are probably varying the hues of a colored texture to manage different shades.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#29

Post by 00joe »

kalleboo wrote: post #22
lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

Does anyone know how much disk space a map tile set of the whole world takes up? It obviously depends wholly on zoom levels, etc, but if anyone has done this themselves I'd love to hear more about their experience.

about 54 TB. But only about 2% of tiles have ever been seen. Each zoom level has 4 times as many tiles as the previous level and zoom level 18 (the highest) doesnt have a lot of data.

Re: New OpenStreetMap tiles from Stamen: water color, black and white, terrain

#30

Post by 00joe »

vidarh wrote: post #19
lucianof wrote: post #7

When I first looked at OpenStreetMap a couple years ago I dismissed it solely because I didn't like the tile design. But now I see more and more really beautiful designs popping up (e.g. also those from http://mapbox.com/ ) and I expect OSM to gain a lot of importance in the next years (overtaking Google Maps maybe?). These 3rd-party tile designs a beautiful example of how much more can be done with data that's truly…

"Everyone" won't ever use OSM - its license is prohibitively restrictive for a lot of uses. It's great for anyone that don't want to combine it with data they can't release, but for anyone that needs to mash it up with proprietary data, it's a non-starter by design. I think a lot of people don't realize this, as I've seen more than one company use OSM data in ways that either puts them in conflict with the license or…

I think you can layer data on top of tiles from osm with the openlayers api without licensing issues.
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