I've noticed a lot of changes to the Mapnik slippymap rendering lately, and
IMHO they are mainly not improvements.
As the appearance of this map layer has a large impact on the public face of
OSM, I think it's important to have lots of people discuss their views on this.
Personally I don't like many of the recent changes because:
-Everything's in pastel shades. Bold colours are clearer and look better.
-Primary, trunk and secondary roads have no casing on them. This makes road
junctions into a big mess, and you can't see what's what at all.
-New icons are a bit pale. I think the old ones looked better. Although I can
see reasons for making them smaller, I don't think they are as clear.
-The road refs aren't centred properly in their boxes. This looks really poor.
Also, they aren't as clear as the used to be.
-Train stations were better in red than blue, as they stood out better. Again,
I find the new colour too pale.
-Road widths at z=17 seem too wide relative to other zoom levels.
I appreciate the effort people are putting into trying to make the map look as
good as possible, but I think we need more opinion input and discussion on what
looks best.
I'm really looking to spark discussion here, rather than be critical, though
unfortunately all of my comments happen to be negative.
I would go ahead and make what I think are improvements myself, but I don't
know anything about tweaking rendering styles.
Regards,
Dave
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