Find: maps.stamen.com is live

Watercolor maps! Stamen strikes again. Sweet. 

Check out Raleigh, or <your city>. This isn't a one off, but a working site. 

maps.stamen.com is live

maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free.

*takes deep breath*

There are three styles available: toner, terrain, and watercolor:

• Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes it easier to like focus on the interactive nature of online cartography: when do different labels show up for different cities? what should the thickness of freeways be at different zoom levels? and so forth. This project is the one that Nathaniel is hacking on at all hours, and it's great to be seeing Natural Earth data get more tightly integrated into the project over time.

Terrain occupies a middle ground: "shaded hills, nice big text, and green where it belongs." In keeping with City Tracking's mandate to make it easier for people to tell stories about cities, this is an open-source alternative to Google's terrain maps, and it uses all open-source software like Skeletron to improve on the base line cartographic experience. Mike has been heading up this design, with help from Gem Spear and Nelson Minar.

Watercolor pushes through to the other side of normal, bending the rules of traditional legibility in order to explore some new terrain. It incorporates hand-painted textures and algorithmic rule sets into a design that looks like it's been done by 10,000 slaves in the basement, but is rendered on th...