Please, don't look at text and don't rate how it looks with forum background. Check the lines drawn on map background, especially with low zoom.
As I noted in my post, I'm aware that text is no substitute for looking over the maps. My only intent was to get a very quick & dirty impression of contrast against light backgrounds.
I've made some custom mapviews to test tweaked color schemes...
More on this below...
The discussion begins here: http://tm.teresco.org/forum/index.php?topic=131.msg2276#msg2276
Lightsalmon was introduced because red and magenta are too strong.
...as noted in michih's
Reply #47.
1. Yellow (looks a little bit over the top, maybe "gold" is more restrained?)
2. Magenta (sticks a little out like red though)
Yeah man, that magenta is yecchy.
A more restrained gold might be better than the over-the-top canary yellow. My attempt at toning it down some is
here.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, it's a good time for some
Custom mapviewsusing the alternate colors I posted...
oscar in NSmichih in DEUsi404 in ENGKeep in mind that our colors will usually be viewed not on a white background, but overlaid on online maps with their own color schemes. Yellow is likely to get lost on Google Maps, which has a palette tending to yelllows (which I don't like). OSM/Mapnik's tiles have their own color scheme, which we should also try not to overlap so users can tell the difference between the lines TMs draws and those on the underlying map.
When first looking at the DEU mapviews, it took me a second to pick out the Tier 4 / lightsalmon routes; they're well camouflaged against OSM's red/pink/magenta/purple/salmon palette. (Look next door at the Netherlands, with its dense road network.) Then, I realized I was looking at TravelMapping's overlays on a background of Germany that was mostly blank space.
Hey, not bad... 
Roads that are themselves darker on the underlying map are likely to overlaid with a darker, E.G. blue or teal polyline.
So, while important to keep in mind, this may not be as bad is it sounds at first blush.
The roads Google is likely to show as yellow in North America would largely be Tier 4 roads, and thus get a brown polyline. Yellow, for Tier 5, would be mostly roads that start out as white on Google, at least in the US. In NS and AB, I see some Tier 5 roads marked yellow by Google to start with, but I don't think this is a problem -- what we'd really want to avoid IMO is a light polyline against a dark-colored road on the background. I have yet to find an instance of this.
Oscar: I've darkened the yellow a bit, making it into more of a gold. How does it look in your mapview of NS?
I'm happy with yellow but don't like untraveled lightsalmon. The contrast between untraveled lightsalmon to the typical map colors is really bad and should be darker
I've tweaked the untraveled lightsalmon, making it a bit darker and more saturated. It still matches the OSM color scheme
(inevitable for a lightsalmon, I suppose), but contrasts with the light background a little better. How does it look in your mapview of DEU?
What do you think of the changes I made to the yellow?
I would like the darker green - both usaib, and eure, are signed with a darker green than the #00FF00 we currently have.
Seconded! Traveled green should be darker, untraveled green is fine.
I've darkened the green (though perhaps a bit too much?); what I used in the mapview link is a bit darker than on CHM.
As for clinched lightsalmon, maybe I should take that back closer to the current
TM default...
All in all, it's a bit of a balancing act.On the one hand, as michih & si have noted, the combination of dense systems and low zoom levels can present blobs of color that are jarring and overwhelming if too bright. For this reason, I think lighter and less saturated colors are good for the lower (higher-numbered) tiers.
(Back to the ugly magenta again -- I'll attach some mockups of canabs at the end of the post to help illustrate.)OTOH, as oscar & michih have noted, we want to avoid lighter colors with too little contrast, that are difficult to see against lighter backgrounds and maps.
I'm trying to find a good compromise between these two (somewhat opposed) goals.Play around with the mapview links above; add in your own username and your preferred region and have a look around. (The NS example is better for North America; the DEU & ENG examples are better for Europe.)
Just keep in mind that these mockups won't be a 1:1 representation of how things would really look with these as the default colors, as colors are only specified on a tier-by-tier, not system-by-system, basis. Many regions have different-colored systems of the same tier, such as usausb & usasf.How do things look?
