I really liked the blog post. I really like the styling. It has a very strong brand. However, one thing on using your maps. I have an astigmatism, which makes tall narrow characters hard to read, especially at an angle. Here's my observations:
- Look at WEST 8TH ST. Zoom in as far as possible, then zoom out one click. That was the easiest for me to read because it was higher contrast and the letters naturally had more space in and around the letters.
- WASHINGTON SQ N is almost impossible for me to distinguish. All I could make out was WA...TON SO N at first. I couldn't tell that there was a Q in SQ and kept thinking it was an O.
This is something I'd thought about actually, but not really covered in the post: Google has, I'm sure, done hours upon hours of research into map clarity. Sizes, colours, fonts, etc. By switching away from Google I'm losing all that- and any updates they publish.
So it's a double edged sword. The good news is that I can keep iterating- I'm not happy with a number of the zoom levels as they are right now (labels not repeating often enough, too small text, etc) and in time I intend to go back and fix those issues. So thanks for the detail- I'll definitely keep it in mind.
In shorter term good news: If you're on an iPhone >=4, the retina tiles are considerably more readable.
- Look at WEST 8TH ST. Zoom in as far as possible, then zoom out one click. That was the easiest for me to read because it was higher contrast and the letters naturally had more space in and around the letters.
- WASHINGTON SQ N is almost impossible for me to distinguish. All I could make out was WA...TON SO N at first. I couldn't tell that there was a Q in SQ and kept thinking it was an O.
- I really, really like the map styling.
Hopefully that helps you.