Hi there OpenMapTiles / MapTiler team!
I wanted to say thank you for making the vector version of Dark Matter and bringing it to a wide audience. I worked on the original raster Dark Matter for CartoDB many years ago at Stamen, and I'm glad to see Dark Matter having such a long and useful life!
Recently I've been doing some research into the history of dark mode maps (for a talk that my colleague Kelsey Taylor just presented at NACIS last month) and I recall how the original version of Dark Matter we created in 2014 was really just too dark to be really usable in most situations. A few years later in 2017, Mamata Akella at CARTO made some changes to the Dark Matter palette to improve the overall contrast, and I have to say the result looks a lot better.
Here's a screenshot from CARTO's blog post announcing the updates:
As far as I can tell, the original 2014 Stamen version of Dark Matter is what is in this repo: https://github.com/CartoDB/CartoDB-basemaps
...but the updated styles from 2017 onward are in a different CARTO repo here: https://github.com/CartoDB/basemap-styles
Both are licensed CC-BY.
It seems like the OpenMapTiles version of Dark Matter in this repo is based on the original low-contrast colors, and not the improved contrast version.
I know you probably don't have any immediate plans to update this style repo, but I just wanted to bring this to your attention in case it ever comes up, that you might want to update some or all of the colors in this style to take advantage of the improved contrast in CARTO's more recent version of Dark Matter. Just a suggestion!
Hi there OpenMapTiles / MapTiler team!
I wanted to say thank you for making the vector version of Dark Matter and bringing it to a wide audience. I worked on the original raster Dark Matter for CartoDB many years ago at Stamen, and I'm glad to see Dark Matter having such a long and useful life!
Recently I've been doing some research into the history of dark mode maps (for a talk that my colleague Kelsey Taylor just presented at NACIS last month) and I recall how the original version of Dark Matter we created in 2014 was really just too dark to be really usable in most situations. A few years later in 2017, Mamata Akella at CARTO made some changes to the Dark Matter palette to improve the overall contrast, and I have to say the result looks a lot better.
Here's a screenshot from CARTO's blog post announcing the updates:
As far as I can tell, the original 2014 Stamen version of Dark Matter is what is in this repo: https://github.com/CartoDB/CartoDB-basemaps
...but the updated styles from 2017 onward are in a different CARTO repo here: https://github.com/CartoDB/basemap-styles
Both are licensed CC-BY.
It seems like the OpenMapTiles version of Dark Matter in this repo is based on the original low-contrast colors, and not the improved contrast version.
I know you probably don't have any immediate plans to update this style repo, but I just wanted to bring this to your attention in case it ever comes up, that you might want to update some or all of the colors in this style to take advantage of the improved contrast in CARTO's more recent version of Dark Matter. Just a suggestion!