{"id":619,"date":"2012-03-20T21:51:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T04:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/?p=619"},"modified":"2012-03-28T22:26:56","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T05:26:56","slug":"stamens-watercolor-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/stamens-watercolor-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"Stamen’s watercolor maps"},"content":{"rendered":"

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My friends at Stamen<\/a> keep doing wonderful new things to maps. Today’s innovation: a globe’s worth of map tiles rendered automatically in the style of a watercolor painting<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This is the kind of project I could only dream of, back when I was doing this kind of research<\/a>. So much has happened since then! Stamen’s tiles combine scanned watercolor textures with vector map data from Open Street Maps, and various image-based filters for effects like edge darkening. The results are organic, seamless and beautiful. Even though I know the textures will repeat themselves eventually, I can’t help scrolling out into the ocean, just to see what’s there.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Zach has posted a really nice step-by-step breakdown<\/a> of how they did this. (Gaussian blurs and Perlin noise are your friends here.) I particularly love the way they use small multiples and animated gifs to explore the parameter space:<\/p>\n

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Update 2:<\/strong> And now Geraldine has put up her post about painting the watercolor background textures<\/a>. A process of discovery and exploration, with much trial and error. As a bonus, she’s put up a set of lovely texture samples<\/a> on Flickr.<\/p>\n

\"Flickr<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friends at Stamen keep doing wonderful new things to maps. Today’s innovation: a globe’s worth of map tiles rendered automatically in the style of a watercolor painting. This is the kind of project I could only dream of, back when I was doing this kind of research. So much has happened since then! Stamen’s … Continue reading Stamen’s watercolor maps<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interactive","category-npar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":631,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions\/631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherthings.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}