Zoom button

Navigation widget: Zoom button.

Census Bureau: Magnifying glass most common metaphor for zooming in on web maps.

Being among the first web mapping applications, the TIGER Map Service was able to put its stamp on interface design for online mapping services. Continue reading...

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Paper maps, improved

Go check out Map 2, the Zoomable Map on Paper. It's a brilliant idea put on paper (no pun intended): unfolding a map gives you a larger-scaled version of the same area you were looking at when it was unfolded. Fair enough, we have seen inset maps on cartographic products for centuries that highlight a particular area (e.g. a town plan) or of the main map or display a different topic (e.g. the administrative divisions). This time, actually the whole map is shown at a larger scale!

The Zoomable Map.

The new product immmediately reminded me Panamap from Urban Mapping that we now all know for their Neighborhoods products that's now part of many online mapping portals. There are Panamaps for Chicago and Manhattan: when viewing the paper map at different angles, you see different topics of the same area such as a town plan, the transit network, tourist destinations, and neighbourhoods.

It's great to see that features primarily associated with Web cartography such as zooming and switching layers are finding their way into paper maps. Hey, let's not forget Walking Papers by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design: it provides a print out of OpenStreetMap that you can annotate with edits and additions. Next you scan in your print-out and use it as a background in an OpenStreetMap editor to further improve the map data.  permanent link for this entry