When mapping is turning to art … Cartifact are the ones that teamed with Yahoo! to get the maps a new, pleasant & unique look.
LA Metro
Really take a look at their gallery what they do is like plastic surgery 
The new map styles aim to present cartographic information in a clean and attractive format, calling upon both local conventions and graphic techniques derived from the long history of printed maps.At various zoom levels, Cartifact has supplied data and imagery for the new Yahoo! Maps styles, including shaded relief showing land surface features and land cover coloring indicating major environmental zones. In the maps of New York and San Francisco, Cartifact also defined and labeled neighborhoods, and at the closest views, labeled and colored selected buildings to designate their primary usage.
I remember when we sat with Graham Marriott, President of cartifact in London and later in Sunnyvale. During our first meeting in London, to discuss the EU approach of the Yahoo! Maps imagery “redesign”, he put a huge number of different “old shool” printed maps on the table he obviously bought on a shopping spree earlier the day.
This was a fabulous starting point for the discussion and pretty easily made clear that different countries have their very own way of designing maps – be it colouring of streets, the amount of information for a certain scale or the way the terrain characteristic is implemented in the picture.
I’ve learned a lot in those meetings, and was excited to see the results live – not that I could claim any honour for getting this done this all goes to the US maps team and the people from Cartifact – but it was great to get a bit of an insight.
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I worked on the implementation side of the new map styles, but a lot of the credit for the new look and feel of the map goes to Cartifact (particularly Graham and Bruce Daniel) – little details, such as the colors, line widths, icons, and overall experience. Credit also goes to people in our own UED team, particularly Jane Jao. The collaboration has been a ying-yang sort of experience – they brought a level of artistic attention and creative cartographic insight that had been missing from Yahoo!’s (or anybody’s else’s) online maps, while we had years of technological expertise and close monitoring of users needs to make it all practical. There were, most certainly, competing design principles involved in the design, usually along the fault lines of “what is most useful” versus “what is most attractive”, “what can we serve up quickly” vs. “what more can we display”. And there were compromises along the way . . . the results from the automated software may look a little less nice than carefully touched-up mock-ups made under Adobe Illustrator … but I’m pleased with how close we got, and we have something more to strive for. I think this principled tension produced results that only benefit our users, for both the immediate term and the future.
One the things I happiest about: our map styles no longer bear a resemblance to maps from, um, those other guys – it is distinctly Yahoo!
hey Alan,
thanks for your comment and for sharing some more insight about the process.
I can imagine that the process was quite challenging, as it surely had something of two worlds collide. Cartifact really being from the far “artists” end of the mapping world. Putting a lot of time into Illustrator to work on a pice of art. This approach – as you mentioned – is not easily applicable to a product that has to work worldwide, on all sorts of output-devices (96dpi instead of 600dpi is a different game) and for all sorts of scales.
However I could not be more agreed about the fact that It’s great that you can now easily tell – This is a Yahoo! Map
Thanks
Thanks go to the whole Yahoo! team (US & EU) for making Cartifact’s collaboration very smooth. From the outset, the team was on the “same page” with very few disagreement on direction or style – a rare situation indeed.
Since we were given “Carte Blanche” to get creative, Alan, Jane and Tom Wailes became an important bridge between the artistic and the practical. Alan stretched his code to accomodate our vision while other ideas met the “cutting room floor” due to technological limitations.
I believe the project was a learning experiece for all. We were artistically stretched to rethink our traditional stylesets in the print world to work in an online environment while Yahoo! gained familiarity with the cartographic process.
I do remember the first meeting in Londay with Frank and Heike Roettgers having just left Stamford’s with a pile of my favorite EU maps. I wanted to be true to long-standing map conventions in the UK, FR & DE and perhaps bring back some historic cartographic romance into present day online mapping.
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