[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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