Stately - A US state map in a font • Hacker News Board

Stately - A US state map in a font

#1

Post by petewarden » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 7:12 PM UTC

Stately - A US state map in a font
intridea.github.com

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#2

Post by zaius » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 7:28 PM UTC

I like the idea of styling a map properly with CSS. I love the sheer WTF factor.

The fact we're seeing fonts (ab)used in this manner (and for icon fonts) says that we're sorely missing a good technical solution.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#3

Post by Camillo » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 7:46 PM UTC

zaius wrote: post #2

I like the idea of styling a map properly with CSS. I love the sheer WTF factor. The fact we're seeing fonts (ab)used in this manner (and for icon fonts) says that we're sorely missing a good technical solution.

Wikipedia (technically Wikimedia Commons, or whatever it's called) has lots of maps in SVG. I've used those before.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#4

Post by Camillo » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 7:50 PM UTC

This is great, but I'm really looking forward to support for animated fonts in Firefox.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#5

Post by T-hawk » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:00 PM UTC

zaius wrote: post #2

I like the idea of styling a map properly with CSS. I love the sheer WTF factor. The fact we're seeing fonts (ab)used in this manner (and for icon fonts) says that we're sorely missing a good technical solution.

Amazing indeed. So what is this font abuse really getting at? It's a means to introduce semantic information into vector graphics. Defining the semantics of a state, its shape and name, allows us to treat the state as an abstraction that can have formatting applied to it.

So how did web fonts end up as the approach? Because that's where browsers first acquired the notion of confluencing semantics and vector graphics. Fonts demand all the advantages of those entities: semantic information to define characters suitable for mapping to glyphs, the ability to apply styling to those glyphs (bold/italic/etc), and raster-independent scalability.

Could SVG do something like this, include semantic hooks in a file for applying styles? (I'm not too familiar with the format.)

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#6

Post by mnicole » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:00 PM UTC

zaius wrote: post #2

I like the idea of styling a map properly with CSS. I love the sheer WTF factor. The fact we're seeing fonts (ab)used in this manner (and for icon fonts) says that we're sorely missing a good technical solution.

http://kartograph.org/ (and other such libs) exists, but I'm not sure it's as "designer-friendly" as a pure CSS solution, despite being able to style them in your stylesheet all the same.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#7

Post by shinynewmac » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:03 PM UTC

You'll all regret adding -ly to anything eventually. Still really awesome, can't wait to see the rest of the world.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#8

Post by shmerl » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:05 PM UTC

Hm, why can't this be done with simply using SVG instead of using fonts in such manner?

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#9

Post by StacyC » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:05 PM UTC

shinynewmac wrote: post #7

You'll all regret adding -ly to anything eventually. Still really awesome, can't wait to see the rest of the world.

Wellly that’s justly your opinionly.

Re: Stately - A US state map in a font

#10

Post by ldayley » Tue, Feb 05, 2013, 8:16 PM UTC

Stateface is another good font if you'd simply like images of the individual states. https://github.com/propublica/stateface

It doesn't display the entire map like this (so the use case is different), but it's pretty cool all the same.