[OSM-talk] Icons for most popular items on default map

[Daniel Koć]

Hi,

For some time lately we're working on the icons for default map. 
Nebulon42 is the driving force behind moving from current variety of 
PNG/SVG icons to more uniform set of pixel-aligned SVGs where possible, 
while I try to learn making new icons for very popular items.

That's where I look for your help: drawing icons is not as hard as I 
thought initially, even with just 14x14 pixel matrix available, but 
designing them - finding the right visual metaphors and looking for 
feedback on recognizability - is in turn more complicated than expected. 
There is only a bunch of active people on osm-carto, so I thought you 
could help us with that (or more, if you like =} ).

For a start I made a list of the most popular shops with no icon and 
created issues for all of them to discuss separately:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1460

Taginfo says there are few more to cross the 10k uses line shortly. This 
border is just a convenient way to pick not too many items and it works 
great for me (shops first, however there are still some massively tagged 
amenities that may use the icon one day), but you don't have to limit 
yourself - just try to relax and remember there's simply no guarantee 
any of them will be rendered, because there's no strict policy on most 
things happening on osm-carto, however popularity is of course an 
important factor.

I also tried to pick up some popular icons from French OSM style:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1402

but that was before I learned using Inkscape and have followed 
nebulon42's path of pixel-aligned SVGs. =} Still you can find the 
corresponding tickets there and discuss or help in any other way.

Next step for me will be creating testing environment to check how these 
icons would look like on real map, but that requires me to dig deeper 
into writing Dockerfiles. It's still waiting, but hopefully eventually I 
will do that and icons will in fact appear on default map.

-- 
Piaseczno Miasto Wąskotorowe