Aesthetically pleasing online map apps.

I’ve thought about posting a full article on this topic (and I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots to include if I ever do), but honestly I probably won’t ever bother to complete the full article. So, I’m going to just go ahead and post the basic gist of it.

There are shit tons of online mapping applications. The quality varies wildly, and most of them have been built for some particular purpose. You wouldn’t want to try to use Waze when what you really want is Arc GIS, for example. Still, I thought about comparing wildly different applications on the basis of my own very subjective perception of how aesthetically pleasing they are. Lemme just quickly summarize the results for the ten apps I looked into, divided into four tiers.

UGLY. IRREDEEMABLE.

Waze. The app is obviously purely focused on driving directions. The maps are ugly as fuck. It’s forgivable because it seems that the designers were purely focused on function over beauty. For example, they don’t show building footprints when you zoom in close. They show PARKING LOTS ONLY!

Mapquest. An old school app that still exists, but totally sucks. If you don’t have an ad-blocker enabled, they literally show TWO BANNER ADS in the MIDDLE OF THE MAP! One at the top. One at the bottom. Even with an ad-blocker, the maps are ugly as shit.

UNAPPEALING, BUT NOT ENTIRELY HORRIBLE.

Rand McNally. In some ways, their maps are actually pretty decent. The big problem, however, is that they don’t seem to have solved the technical problems of creating a map app. All of their maps appear to be rasterized and jpeg compressed, so they can’t achieve anything close to the sharpness of their competitors who all use vector graphics. Some of their maps also seem awkwardly stitched together with breaks in the style. Not great.

Mapcarta. Mapcarta blatantly uses Open Street Maps excellent detailed data. (Rand McNally kinda does too, for that matter. Just not as effectively.) Mapcarta blatantly flouts convention when it comes to labelling, though. It results in whimsical maps that I do kinda like. They also have some interesting choices of graphics. Their amateurish presentation really hurts them, though.

Duck Duck Go/Apple Maps. I’m typing this on my Mac Book Pro, so I have access to the apple maps desktop application, but most of my experience with apple maps comes from their use on the Duck Duck Go website. I think the colors are much too muted and the icons that appear when you zoom in to the neighborhood level are honestly pretty hideous. It’s still a huge step up from the likes of Waze, Mapquest, and Rand McNally, though. Special recognition must be given to the beautifully detailed golf courses you’ll find in apple maps.

VERY GOOD, BUT NOT THE ABSOLUTE BEST.

Google. Google maps are the ones I’m most familiar with. The quality is consistently high. Light years ahead of any of the five shitty apps I mentioned previously. I want to make it very clear that this app and all of the four apps I haven’t mentioned yet are excellent (at least in terms of their aesthetic appeal).

Bing. Bing’s quality is generally similar to Google’s, but I love Bing’s use of bold, saturated colors and dark topographic shading (which I’d also describe as bold). Overall, you get very striking maps. Bing is also the only app of the ten that actually draws in the shape of buildings when you zoom in close enough. The other apps only draw in building footprints. (Google used to draw in building shapes, but they changed it at some point.) That’s great, but it definitely could be better. All that bold topographic shading gets very, very fuzzy by the time you zoom in close enough to see the building shapes.

Here Wego. I don’t know much about this app, but its maps are gorgeous. In particular, it draws incredible region level maps (as in, maps the size of the state of Texas). None of the other apps draws aesthetically pleasing maps at that zoom level. No matter how beautiful they look when you’re zoomed in closer, they end up looking flat and ugly by the time you zoom out to region level. Here Wego totally nails it, though.

TRULY INCREDIBLE!

Arc GIS. The map fiend’s choice. Their maps are extremely customizable, with lots of choices of base maps and labeling schemes. For the purpose of comparing their maps to everybody else’s, I just looked at the default topographic base map that displays when you first load the site. IT. IS. GORGEOUS! It looks absolutely amazing just about everywhere you look. Still, it’s not quite my very favorite. That honor goes to…

Open Street Map! Their maps are ridiculously detailed. They show far, far more than the other apps do, and it results in a supremely ornate aesthetic effect. I especially like these maps at the neighborhood zoom level, where they draw in tons and tons of teeny tiny buildings. None of the other apps I looked at comes close to this rapturous beauty.

So there you have it! My very subjective ranking of ten internet map apps by how pretty their maps look to my own untrained eye. I may yet post an actual article with the screen caps to really get into the nitty-gritty comparisons, but we’ll have to see! Thank you for your time!!