Stamen Design reinvents cartographic design

If you love the functionalities of online mapping services such as OpenStreetMap and Google Map, but you are fed up with their graphic design, the company Stamen Design has developed something for you: three background maps that you can use to render your own OpenStreetMap mashup. These three maps are: (1) Toner, a sharp high-contrast black and white that reminds me futuristic urban planning maps; (2) the more conventional Terrain which looks more like a shaded relief; (3) and the beautiful watercolor (my favorite) which is described as follows: “Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, our watercolor maps apply raster effect area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm pop to any map.” Since these maps use Open Source data (from OpenStreetMap) and are licenced under a creative commons licence, it would not be surprising to see them (and others) more and more frequently on the web, which would be great!

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