Stamen made some lovely world wide watercolour tiles:
<a href="http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor/#12/37.7706/-122.3782" rel="nofollow">http://maps.stamen.com/watercolor/#12/37.7706/-122.3782</a><p>They explained the process on their blog:
<a href="http://content.stamen.com/watercolor_process" rel="nofollow">http://content.stamen.com/watercolor_process</a>
The jquery resource used in this page is not being loaded over HTTPS, so my browser configuration (Chrome + HTTPS Everywhere) is refusing to load it, which means none of the page works.<p>This is a really easy fix, just changing <a href="http://ajax.google.." rel="nofollow">http://ajax.google..</a>. to //ajax.google... will load it over the same protocol used to load the full page.
This is the best thing to show to the "Google Maps is better" crowd. It's a poster child for the importance of open-data sources. Kudos to this.
Try doing that with Google's data. Even if you worked in the right department, you would have to pass this through management. With open data you just have to do it!
A similar thing:<p><a href="http://dessine-moi-une-ville.makina-corpus.net" rel="nofollow">http://dessine-moi-une-ville.makina-corpus.net</a><p>I think it's a limited area though.
Very cool! In case anyone else wants to poke around the source, here it is: <a href="https://github.com/mapmeld/Crayon-Canvas" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mapmeld/Crayon-Canvas</a>
Here's San Francisco:<p><a href="http://crayonmap.herokuapp.com/#map=12/37.774650/-122.434216" rel="nofollow">http://crayonmap.herokuapp.com/#map=12/37.774650/-122.434216</a>