April 2-4, 2012 saw the Where 2.0 Conference come to San Francisco. Most of the studio went to at least one morning or afternoon, to watch many of our friends present on what they’re up to, and of course, to watch Eric talk about maps.stamen.com, and all the different parts we worked out to get the system launch-ready. Here are Eric’s slides (13MB PDF):

It’s been absolutely brilliant to watch the web’s response to the new maps – I’ll post more on that later, including links and examples of the maps being used and reused in other sites, one of the key goals for CityTracking.

We also prepared a surprise to accompany Eric’s talk on Wednesday: newspapers from Newspaper Club that contained watercolor maps of 20 cities around the world (Thank you, thank you, to Anne, Russell, Ben and Tom from Newspaper Club for helping us get the papers ready in time!)

Nathaniel is in Washington, DC at the moment, and also presented about how we created the Watercolor maps to a super-smart geo-tech audience today at Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) North America. “Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, Stamen’s new watercolor tiles apply area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm pop to any map. We’ve added more Photoshop-style raster effects to TileStache to render OSM tiles like you’ve never seen them before.”

In case you missed them, we posted a week-long series of blog posts to accompany the launch of maps.stamen.com from various people at Stamen:

• Eric announcing the launch,
• Zach explaining how a watercolor map is generated,
• Geraldine talking hand-painted textures, including this CC-licensed set you can use on Flickr,
• Mike on the Terrain map tiles, and
• Jeff on how we made maps to watch people looking at maps

If only I’d gotten this blog online in time (!!!).