 On a website, a tiny hand clicks on a watercolor map of the world, then searches for Seattle. We zoom in on a hand-painted rendering of the city's street grid. I wanted to embrace the history of cartography as a way of saying, it doesn't have to be just straight lines. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Watercolor map tiles by Stamen Design. A light-skinned man with a red beard, Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck, is backed by a monitor displaying a watercolor map. 2005, when Google Maps first came out, I mean, I was terrified. I thought our work was over. That's it, the machines have eaten the market, and there's going to be no more mapping work to do. So when this came out, it was widely, it was talked about in the press as an alternative to Google Maps, and then more coagently open street map was seen as the alternative to Google street map for a lot of different reasons. So we're kind of part of that conversation. People don't think about who's making these maps, or how they get made, or how they get updated, or any of that kind of stuff. And it's an incredibly complex, fascinating, multi-layered, continuous, ongoing artifact, technical artifact that is made by robots, it's a collaboration between robots and humans. It's amazing, you know? So I didn't want to make a nostalgic gesture, but I did want to call attention to the fact that these maps were being made by people. I really wanted to sort of get this texture of a city to give it almost a hallucinatory quality, where you just would pay attention, not just to it as a directional device, but as something with composition. But the composition, of course, is made by the world, not by us, right? Behind the design. It was mainly a collaboration between Geraldine and Zach Watson. And Mike Mogersky worked with Zach to design a process by which these could be generated using the textures. Geraldine made a number of textures, which we've logged about. And then Zach Watson started making maps out of them and sort of putting them through the different pieces of software that he was using. And then he would go back to Geraldine and say, where do you think about this? And then she would make a new texture for him. And they were able to really adjust the way in which the lines here, you'll see that they're not straight very much by design. They overlap one another. And that's all very intentional. And really the whole point was to make something that you couldn't tell what parts of it had been done by hand and what parts of it had been done by a machine. I wanted that line to be blurred. So it was very much always intended to be and continues to be driven by Open Street. More maps are explored. The data that's underlying it is exactly the same, but there's a number of different steps. There's essentially a rendering process that happens to get something that, from a data perspective, looks much more like that to something that looks like that. So there's blurring and there's noising and there's Perlin filters and there's blowing out and there's all that stuff. The whole point of this was to make it as bone-simple as possible. I mean, to make something that was highly difficult and virtuosistic and took a lot of resources and just flattened people's ability to access it, make it so that it was... Again, you didn't need to sign up. There's no API. There's no technical. You copy and paste this, put it on your website. You've got a map. Watercolor map tiles use. Rather than having to do a screenshot and do all that nonsense, you should just be able to adjust the size and then this is where we show you all the different styles that there are. There's more than are on the front. So there's these images that get made and then you can go to results and you can see all the maps that people have made. Examples are shown. This was another thing that was just really distracting to me as the project developed. It was just like, where in the world do people care about enough to make these images? And it turns out, thousands and thousands and thousands of places. And why did somebody pick this particular... This looks like it was done for a school project. Somebody's doing a project about Southeast Asia. People are just making these for use in their projects. And there's one every couple of minutes. Some maps are in color, others in black and white. Some feature hundreds of streets, others few or none. On maps. The most viewed place on Google Maps is your house. That's where people always go. It's an amazing phenomenon. You have a map of the whole world. You could go to Petra, you could go to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, you could go to Antarctica, you could go anywhere, but where do you go, your house? And in some ways that's a grounding gesture of if I know my house is on there, I can recognize that my house. That's sort of a touchstone that means if this is accurate then everything else must be accurate. And I think something like that is going on here. There's a lot of places that they care about, which can be as broad as Europe or as narrow as a park. We zoom in on a green space. And that's the sort of wonderful thing about these maps and maps like this in general, is that there's this kind of, people care about them. Watercolor Map Tiles website, 2012 to 15. Designed by Eric Rodenbeck, Zachary Watson, Geraldine Sarmiento, Nathaniel Kelso, Ligurski, Stamen Design.