[OSM-talk] Red and green routes
Richard Fairhurst
richard at systemeD.net
Mon Nov 20 21:25:51 GMT 2006
From some quirk of development history, OSM clients currently seem
to render primary/secondary roads the "wrong" way round.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Image:Oxford-svg.png is a
good example of a lovely Osmarendered map. The ring road, A40, A44,
A420 etc. are all red. The A4260, A4165 etc. are all green.
The same applies to the (deeply cool) new slippy map, with the added
wrinkle that it's red and orange, not red and green, for the smallest
scale maps.
Most UK maps would paint the primary routes green, and the secondary
ones red - not least because primary routes over here have green
signs. OSM is of course an international project, and there's no
reason to adopt UK conventions. But I'm not aware that the current
colours tally with any standard practice elsewhere.
Looking at Google, they appear to attempt to use standardish colours
for different nationalities. So maps.google.co.uk uses something
similar to the above, maps.google.fr uses a different set of colours,
and maps.google.com seems to mostly use line weight rather than colour.
Michelin paper maps (and ViaMichelin), of course, have always
ploughed their own furrow and have an individual (and delightful)
style of cartography. OS are moving towards the standard green/red/
orange scheme in the UK. Most "automated" cartographies on the web
are so negligible design-wise that I doubt they're worth learning from.
Personally I'd vote that we standardise on green=primary,
red=secondary, orange=tertiary, but whatever happens, we should seek
a colour scheme that is:
- consistent over all clients and scales, where possible
- attractive
- not obviously in conflict with well-established principles in any
area of high OSM use
cheers
Richard
(Some maybe-relevant background reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Traffic_sign . Singapore puts its street name signs in the very
designery typeface of Rotis Serif - how cool is that?)
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