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by fatcow 849 days ago
https://map.geo.admin.ch/

Herewith the map site.

I have to admit, the maps (at any zoom levels) are quite beautiful. Much much better than the likes of Apple or Google!

4 comments

Fellow map nerds might also enjoy these:

The new "Light Base Map":

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/web-maps-light-base-map

Demo (Light Base Map):

https://cms.geo.admin.ch/fmc/lbm.html

This is a modernized version of a base map (used to overlay topical maps over it) that they have been working on for the past few years. Available as vector tile. It's very clean and crisp, and IMHO much more readable than e.g. the Google Maps style, or OSM.

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Highly customizable 3D map viewer (under development). Performance is a bit choppy, and navigation feels somewhat clunky. But you can overlay any of the hundreds of topical maps (pick from geocatalog menu, or search via search bar).

Example with hiking trails overlay: https://test.map.geo.admin.ch/#/map?lang=en&sr=3857&center=8...

Light Base Map look very early 2000s. Washed out and low contrast with pastels.. It's very pretty. I'd use it as a background image. But I feel you can't see anything really without really straining yourself. You don't get an immediate sense of the terrain or road network without taking a minute to look at it in detail.

Maybe b/c it's what I grew up with, but I've always found AAA maps (do they still print them?) had the best colors and contrast. I've never found any other map app that looks anywhere nearly as good

Looks a lot like France's IGN vector layers.
The maps on that website have some very cool features including "Journey through time" which allows you to see the maps going back to 1864.
That's not a very high bar.

The style in the same as all pre-Internet paper maps I've seen, but with much higher fidelity. So it looks nice to me, but it's not the most readable, mostly the names do not stand out in the dark green background.

I don't like them - but they're the best you can have when you're in the woods.