Download Style from GitHub

Acetate

Acetate is a new way of thinking about basemap tiles. Made in conjunction with Stamen Design and 41 Latitude, it allows you to layer pieces of the basemap throughout your visualization. We think what we came up with is quite beautiful, but if it’s not to your tastes all the stylesheets and code is opensource so you can roll your own. For developers, GeoIQ has released the stylesheets and code to create the Acetate tiles. Read more about it on our announcement blog post.

Getting Started

Acetate is built upon the Tilestache, Mapnik projects and it uses a combination of PostGIS and Shapefiles to store spatial data. The data used is OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth and some custom data sources. The two custom data sources are created through a process of “simulated annealing.”

Data Needed

In order to get started with the data install PostGIS and download the OpenStreetMap Planet File. You’ll need to use OSM2PGSQL to import it. The process of importing for the whole world can take a while, if you only need a specific country you might want to grab a country specific extract from GeoFabrik. To get the coastline information you’ll need to get the data from Natural Earth.

The custom data is for place names and simplified motorways. You can download the place name shapefiles from here. The simplified motorways is a SQL script that should be run after the OSM Planet is imported.

Software Needed

To get yourself going install Tilestache from Github. From the README Mapnik is listed as an optional dependency but for our purposes you need it.

At the moment we give you all the pieces to roll your own, though look for a full tutorial in the coming weeks.

Installing Acetate

This step is about just placing the acetate project into a web accessible place. Drop them the project into a web dir and start making tiles….

Modifying the Styles

The styles don’t suite your needs the Cascadenik files are here in a separate repository.

 

10 Responses to Acetate

  1. GeoIQ With Stamen Design Rolls Out Acetate a new way of thinking about basemap tiles | AnyGeo - GIS, Maps, LBS, Geo and Social Location Technology says:
    January 19, 2011 at 3:58 pm

    [...] docs, and image galleries and libraries.  Those interested specifically in Acetate should see http://developer.geoiq.com/tools/acetate/. Note, For developers, FortiusOne has released the stylesheets and code to create the Acetate tiles [...]

  2. Tweets that mention Acetate | GeoIQ Developer -- Topsy.com says:
    January 19, 2011 at 10:40 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kate Chapman, IC05. IC05 said: Acetate | GeoIQ Developer: Acetate is a new way of thinking about basemap tiles. Made in conjunction … http://bit.ly/dFOdW2 #delicious [...]

  3. Roll your own Tiles with Acetate | Adam Estrada says:
    January 20, 2011 at 3:23 pm

    [...] Read more… Related Posts:New Bing Maps Version 7 FeaturesHow to copy music from your iPod to your iPhoneSelenium for Web Site testingWordPress as a CMSAptana Acquired by Appcelerator // Share| [...]

  4. Acetate: A Technical Introduction – part 1 | GeoIQ Developer says:
    January 20, 2011 at 6:51 pm

    [...] Acetate [...]

  5. Acetate: A Technical Introduction – part 1 | Off the Map - Official Blog of FortiusOne says:
    January 20, 2011 at 6:54 pm

    [...] week we launched Acetate a collaboration between us, Stamen , and 41 Latitude which allows users to create more compelling [...]

  6. Open Mobile Map » Weekly OSM Summary #9 says:
    April 24, 2011 at 10:38 am

    [...] developed a new map layer tool called Acetate. It allows one to compile several different map layers (roads, road names, POIs, place names) in [...]

  7. Some stuff I’ve been working on with new GeoCommons 2.0 « thinkwhere says:
    June 6, 2011 at 5:40 pm

    [...] Acetate is used as standard [...]

  8. Open Mobile Map » Some stuff I’ve been working on with new GeoCommons 2.0 says:
    June 7, 2011 at 4:32 am

    [...] Acetate is used as standard [...]

  9. Some stuff I’ve been working on with new GeoCommons 2.0 | J2ME GPS says:
    June 12, 2011 at 1:54 pm

    [...] Acetate is used as standard [...]

  10. Leaflet & GeoCommons JSON | GeoIQ Developer says:
    October 31, 2011 at 12:18 pm

    [...] Acetate [...]