[OSM-talk] New Google Maps style - interesting cartographic innovation

[Michał Brzozowski]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 12:36 PM, Oleksiy Muzalyev
<oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch> wrote:
> Using colors like this is an excellent idea, however we shall not rely on
> colors alone as several percent of people cannot distinguish colors due to
> color blindness [1]. Besides, color blindness may develop with an advanced
> age, so no one is color-safe.
>
> We do not hear often about color blindness as people tend not to speak about
> it. But in fact maybe up to ten percent cannot see differences between
> certain colors at all.

I am more interested in the processing step itself and not styling,
which is trivial. To be clear, I am not talking about inclusion of
this in osm-carto. It is overloaded anyway.

I asked myself: If they use buildings to generate it, what do they do
when they aren't available? Turns out that for places without building
outlines they use street geometry to generate highlights [1][2].
Actually, when you compare it to using building outlines [2][3] it
looks somewhat cleaner. But in the end, buildings help too, as streets
may not always cover areas of interest. I speculate it is made similar
in geometrical appearance to built-up areas (orthogonal / straight
edges) on purpose. A smooth blob would be confusing.

I posted a thread here because I thought it may inspire people who
make their own OSM-based map styles ;) The devil is always in the
details and we would learn much from a proof of concept, both in terms
of how to achieve a similar effect and how to integrate external open
datasets in a meaningful manner.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@54.333386,18.2042257,15.92z?hl=en
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@54.3514061,18.6551512,15.88z?hl=en
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@54.5175292,18.5419689,15z?hl=en
[4] https://www.google.com/maps/@54.4440137,18.5640867,16.67z?hl=en

Michał