Hell, I'll even go ahead and play devils advocate and pitch a potential commercial usage for this in the friendly spirit of attacking your cynicism on two fronts :) -- I could imagine an app/site that uses this as a basic to create simple and stylized maps that are suitable for poster-hanging. I see lots of simplified stylized maps that do things like list all of the beach towns or surf breaks along the coast in my area. This could be used to create maps of everywhere in the neighborhood that might be compelling to a child (parks, their friend's houses, the beach, etc).. You could choose icons for the map points, tweak the color palette with a fun drag-tool and order a print... Or make a treasure map for a kid's birthday party. (Obvious potential legal issues using gmaps for this which I won't bother to look into withstanding).
At any rate, I think it's an awesome project, whether or not it has obvious and immediately convertible value... and if someone did a good job building a site as described above, I'd be an immediate customer.
It could be a hack just for fun. People post that kind of thing here too.
It could be a proof of concept statement about how amazing flat UI colours are. People post that kind of thing here.
Either way it would be nice to have a sentence of commentary.
It looks like it was made in response to a shot someone posted on Dribbble http://dribbble.com/shots/1044275-Flat-Map
It was rebounded and coded up, that happens quite a lot on Dribbble when devs see a design they like and have a go at putting it into css/html etc
Thank you sir....I wish I could upvote this 1000x.
I think there should be a new term being coined, such as "flat design extremism", and it should be used as an example of how not to do things. Surely not everything perfectly flat is a good thing?
I took screenshot of same location with the original map and put it next to a screenshot of the "flat" map. http://imgur.com/TdFqpmw
Honestly, aside from some of the missing overlays & text on the "flat" side - I can't see too much of a difference between the two....
The lack of a stroke around the shapes make it difficult to tell the edges of the roads (try counting the number of white roads between bounding yellow roads). Where roads get tangled it's hard to know what's going on.
I personally find the colour palate a bit juvenile and less trustworthy. That might be because I've got used to the more demure extant colours. But I've noticed a trend with 'flat' colour palates being differentiated primarily by hue rather than, for example, brightness. I don't think that's natural for the human eye (I have no data to back that up).
And yes, Google maps is already part of the way to 'flat'. But it's kept the level of detail required to actually be useful. I'm aware that the LHS was a quick hack vs Google having spent a certain amount of time planning their layout.
For me, this deconstruction of a busy map normally filled with labels and places, colored with flat UI style colors that contrast each other and without the visual noise of borders, invites me to build upon it and perhaps start displaying a new layer of data on it.
Except, you know...more useful. Like street names? :)
I truly believe that this was made to satisfy some requirement of a project, or it might have been just for fun. Either way, it's not a bad way to embed a map in a site designed using the "flat" aesthetic.
...But you probably should link to the real Google Maps so people can see where in the hell they are!