Watercolor, Toner, Terrain

April 4, 2012 10:34 PM

Here are some purdy new maps from Stamen Design (previously). Simple, but nice.

Built with OpenStreetMaps (previously: 1, 2).

posted by victory_laser (7 comments total)

This and its associated machineries are super neato.
posted by freebird at 12:08 AM on April 5, 2012

Love the watercolour. Totally impractical, but now I have an irresistible urge to go looking for an A0 printer.
posted by brokkr at 12:49 AM on April 5, 2012

The description of how it works is refreshingly simple.

I don't know if that blur could be done at 60 frames per second though. Maybe?
posted by jonbro at 3:05 AM on April 5, 2012

With hardware acceleration, it should be fast enough these days. Rendering time is no longer much of an obstacle. What makes animating a watercolor look tricky is the set of aesthetic decisions you must make about every aspect of the visual style.
posted by otherthings_ at 7:01 AM on April 5, 2012

It gets REALLY confused over the Great Lakes.
posted by TinWhistle at 7:08 AM on April 5, 2012

There is a lot of interesting work being done in artistic map work. See Woodcut Maps
posted by stp123 at 7:50 AM on April 5, 2012 [2 favorites]

By Metafilter's own Michal Migurski, among others at Stamen. The watercolor maps have gotten the most attention, they are totally beautiful. But I'm most excited about the terrain map. No one has done an open relief map before, despite all the elevation data being public.

Stamen wrote up how they made the maps on their blog. Here's links to the posts: introduction, watercolor process, watercolor textures, terrain process, visualizing usage. Also, bonus cupcakes. Stamen is at the absolute top of their field, the intersection of design and data computation. I've learned a lot in seeing how they approached this map project.
posted by Nelson at 7:55 AM on April 5, 2012 [2 favorites]