search

nationalparkservice / symbol-library

National Park Service map symbols optimized for the web.
Other
112 stars 34 forks source link

Revise symbols and place-markers used in Builder #17

Open jakecoolidge opened 9 years ago

jakecoolidge commented 9 years ago

(In progress--the material to be contained in this comment was initially emailed to Mamata for review Friday afternoon. In summary, I've concluded that the current Builder place-markers are not strong enough as-is, and I've developed an alternative concept with the aim of improving the legibility of Builder symbols. One aspect of this is the use of unmodified, and therefore optimal, 24px and 16px Threespot svgs, plus one additional size to be designed, 12px. Hence the link to issue #16 .)

jakecoolidge commented 9 years ago

I actually worked up some mockups to illustrate my thinking along these lines but never attached them to the issue. For the record, here they are:

Current placemarkers in Builder. The smallest size uses svg artwork that is 9px wide. It's quite difficult to get some of our HFC-based icons to fit this pixel size. I use the Amphitheater symbol to illustrate: current-placemarkers

Idea for revised placemarkers. In this scenario we're creating artwork for four sizes (down from six), and the symbol-to-placemarker area ratio is much higher. The placemarkers do not occupy more screen space than the current ones. idea-for-revised-placemarkers

nateirwin commented 9 years ago

We actually have a design like this that came from Threespot several years back:

map_marker_waypoint

jakecoolidge commented 9 years ago

Was there any interest in using Threespot's design? Did our decision to fork Maki lead us to us the teardrop marker? I realize that to use a different placemarker style will require us to re-tool the way we create pngs and sprites for Builder.

nateirwin commented 9 years ago

We went with Maki because it was easy and the Mapbox teardrop icons worked well with the size of our icons (obviously because they were followed the Maki icon approach). I think the rounded rectangle shape is more NPS-y, so I'd like to move more in that direction.