5 Reference Recipes

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I'm coming back to reference overlays. I've noticed that there a still a fair number of interactive maps online that permit a bullying thematic layer to stomp all over the poor, defenseless map labels and context information. This is not cool:

So I've hashed out the code for getting past this using five common basemap services:

• Mapbox
• Stamen
• Google
• Esri
• Bing

Feel free to reuse them as you see fit. All but the Google example use Leaflet, but the z-index and canvas manipulation tactics are applicable to other APIs as well. If anyone wants to add adaptations for OpenLayers or whatnot I welcome pull requests. Also worth a note is that - in the leaflet examples - the thematic layer is rendered as vector from topojson, which is arguably the fastest vector format available to us today. Give it a shot as a thematic mapping tool.

Go forth and bring context back to your interactive maps!

Note: Thanks to Bobby Sudekum, Josh Livni and Jason Sanford for the starting blocks.

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Tiled Basemaps: the Survey

The time has come once again for a taking of the geopulse! In years past I've asked broad questions about platform-level technology use, but this year I'm getting more specific:

What tiled basemaps do you use in your projects?

Yes, I realize that the very concept of tiles is about to go the way of the Avenue script, but the present moment is still flush with amazing cartography served up in square chunks. For this survey I've chosen a selection of "Streetmap" styles from the major players, since imagery is another can of worms entirely.

I've built a comparison app here (with thanks to Dair Grant for the idea). Check it out and vote for your favorite.

Note: It's not possible to get a perfect comparison, since some maps tiles are locked to a particular API (what up, Apple), and others were too hard to parse into a single web map (Was a quadkey scheme really necessary, Bing?). Feel free to add these in if they serve as your go-to basemaps anyway.

Thanks for participating, and check back here for results in a few weeks!

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