Untitled topic

I disagree with the author. He seems completely enamored with the "harmonious" aesthetics and almost totally ignores the breakdown of usability.

The map is now varying shades of blue. Water is blue. Land is blue. Highways are blue. Even the parks/green spaces look blue. I wouldn't be surprised if the black text is actually a really dark shade of blue. In short, you can't quickly identify land/water boundaries or distinguish river versus highway. BAD!

The author calls the new highway coloring a "net positive". I disagree. Not only are highways and roads now all blue, they are all the same shade of blue. (Toll roads are greenish) With the exception of size, there is no visual difference between large highways and small roads. They're all colored the same. When driving in a new area, I rely on the color scheme to ensure I stay on the main road instead of getting lost in side roads. Google and the old Bing Maps had it right. It's called information hierarchy.

Text is also difficult to read in this new design. The contrast between the background and the text are uncomfortably low. The problem is even worse with state and country labels. Who decided semi-transparent text was a good idea? In addition to the blue roads, blue rivers, blue waters and blue lands, we now have nearly invisible blue text! What are they thinking? As if it wasn't bad enough, sometimes the text is sideways to make it fit. Even worse, the country/state labels sometimes cover city labels.

Another problem with text, because there is no information hierarchy or color system, it really easy to confuse street labels with city labels.

The new design also went too minimal with labels. The old design had too many labels, while the new one almost has none. (Google Maps has it just right, IMO). Even at reasonable zoom levels, one doesn't get the expected amount of city and road labels.

No thanks. I'll stick with Google Maps. This is Bing's Tropicana.