Hi @Gustavo22Soares and team! Thanks for showing me how to access the design board on Figma! I actually was going to attend your talk on design at State of the Map US but at the last minute it got changed to “Let’s talk about MapRoulette” (a great conversation, but not on design.) I think there’s a big need for a refresh of the OSM “look and feel” to be both modern and accessible. Many, many people in the OSM software world are focused on the technical aspects which is great, but often leave much to be desired in the design department.
To quote from the OpenStreetMap Press Kit:
To be honest, OpenStreetMap is neither a map or a city plan, but a database .
This has seemingly been the mantra up to now, basically OSM will focus on the data and Map Styles / tiles can fall to someone else. Atlas I see as a way to have a standardized look and feel that can guide new projects and consumers. To do that, you will need to let us use your work in a compatible license format. There is no other way around that.
In your announcement diary post you mention several times accessibility, and even on your detailed project overview and roadmap you mention this, but I do not see an example of this on any visual media shared. I would like to see your thoughts on a high-contrast setting, a scaled font size, and even screen reader examples to truly get a feel for your accessibility goals of the project.
On the Atlas website, you have a section dedicated to “voice and tone.” In a traditional organization or corporation, this is expected and has mechanisms to present with “one voice.” OpenStreetMap, however, is a collection (and at times a rather loose collection) of different projects, contributors, and consumers. It may prove difficult to enforce such a stance if adopted. Wikipedia does this well with their neutral tone but they also have a bit more structured way to contribute to and moderate content.
When discussing Icons in your style guide, you go over that the choice to use Google icons was made. You’ve done a fantastic job with color, typography, and elemental design, why the sudden offloading to Google (of all companies) for the icons? I did not see OSM specific icons such as node / way / relation and that would be fundamental in an OSM design language (both in a icon/expanded version and a simplified in-line version.)
Some of the work you are doing on your own CSS stylesheet I would recommend working with existing OSM projects. For example, it would serve you great to fork these directories on GitHub:
That would be the major 3 components of the “main OSM site”. Once you fork them, update your ideas on a branch, including any color variants, icons, typography, etc… This should help you see (1) what you may not have thought about as you start to see what’s left of the “old” design and. what still needs adjusting, and (2) once you are happy with a draft version, you can easily create a Pull Request to the main sites and start to engage the maintainers on more than an issue basis as you’ll then have code and screenshots to share.
As far as the politics that happened above, that’s the result of miscommunication (“hope to contribute” is better than “will be the next”) and a general attitude in the overall community to take things slow and not fix things that aren’t broken, at the expense of improvement sometimes!
I’m excited to see where Atlas goes! Please do let us know if you are releasing the designs though, because if you are retaining the designs in a non-OSM-compatible way, all this conversation is for nothing. I would love to use some of the swatches and elements you have come up with, they look great!