Jeff Croft

I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.

Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.

I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.

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Items tagged maps

  • Link // 03.21.2012 // 9:58 AM // 0 Comments

    Stamen map tiles for OpenStreetMap

    These are really stunning, and free to use in your OSM applications. I especially love the Toner one.

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  • Link // 06.09.2010 // 9:34 AM // 0 Comments

    Locals and Tourists

    I love these heat maps — they show the locations of photos taken by locals versus tourists in cities around the word.

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  • Link // 06.09.2009 // 8:26 AM // 0 Comments

    Augmenting photos - with OpenStreetMap!

    This is pretty awesome: Pass in a landscape photo you took, and Marmota generates a simulated panorama 360 degree wraparound of what the landscape looks like from height field data. It then matches your photo’s pitch, yaw and roll and lens angle against this virtual panorama to figure out exactly where you were pointing it. Once it’s done that you can overlay OpenStreetMap data (rods, rivers, etc, etc.) right on your photo. Badass.

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  • Link // 06.07.2009 // 10:35 AM // 1 Comment

    Mapstraction

    Pretty nice-looking abstraction API that gives you a single interface to several different mapping service providers.

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  • Link // 02.05.2009 // 10:07 AM // 0 Comments

    Google Latitude

    Google’s new Dodgeball replacement/Brightkite competitor. Looks okay, but I’m not convinced it’s ready to replace Dodgeball and Brightkites.

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  • Link // 12.18.2008 // 2:50 PM // 13 Comments

    New York City in Photo-Realistic 3D Now in Google Earth

    Yeah, that’s badass.

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  • Link // 11.05.2008 // 10:41 AM // 0 Comments

    2008 Election Maps

    I’m with Kottke: The New York Times’ map was the best of the bunch in terms of both information design and aesthetics. These are fun to look at side-by-side.

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  • Link // 10.29.2008 // 11:04 AM // 0 Comments

    Ork Posters now has Seattle!

    I’ve been waiting for a Seattle Ork posters for a long time. I just purchased the brown screenprint. Love it.

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  • Link // 07.20.2008 // 7:08 AM // 0 Comments

    HeatMap API

    A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map.

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  • Link // 05.01.2008 // 5:58 PM // 0 Comments

    Google diving into 3D mapping of oceans

    Two words: Hell. Yes.

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  • Link // 02.21.2008 // 10:42 PM // 1 Comment

    Google Static Maps API

    Similar to their charts API, Google offers up a static maps interface, whereby map images are served up directly via nothing more than a URL and some parameters. Neat.

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  • Link // 10.12.2007 // 11:47 AM // 0 Comments

    Seattle seismic hazard map

    Looks like I’m about as safe as anyone in the city is, with both my home and work areas residing in “fair” risk zones. I am only a few blocks from higher risk, though, with both Myrtle Edwards Park and the downtown waterfront being pretty much toast (I presume it’s because they’re built on fill). Especially interesting (and surprising, to me), is that the University district is at such risk.

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  • Link // 10.08.2007 // 11:22 AM // 0 Comments

    Google Maps: Seattle Photo Locations

    Flickr member David Hogan (Cap’n Surly) put together a nice Google map of some of his favorite locations for shooting in Seattle. I’ve already been to many of them, but there are definitely a few new ones to me on here that I need to hit up.

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  • Link // 07.18.2007 // 9:59 PM // 7 Comments

    Walk Score - How walkable is your house?

    This is a very cool little Google maps mashup. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. and then tallies the whole thing up into an out-of-100 score.

    My Lawrence house: 22 out of 100. My Seattle house: 77 out of 100.

    w00t.

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  • Link // 07.18.2007 // 6:45 PM // 0 Comments

    Phone Number Geolocator

    This is awesome. From an area code and prefix (i.e. 206-545-xxxx), returns a geo-location. Seems to even work really well with cell phone numbers. Badass.

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  • Link // 05.29.2007 // 7:57 PM // 0 Comments

    Google Maps: Street View

    Holy shit. Google wins. This is freaking awesome.

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  • Link // 05.20.2007 // 4:42 PM // 3 Comments

    LJWorld.com: Alcohol violations: Minors in possession

    Yet another data-oriented interactive journalism project from our crew. Credit for this one goes to Matt Croydon on the data modeling, importing, and JavaScript, Christian Metts on the visual design, and Christine Metz on the reporting (yes, I said Christian Metts and Christine Metz). Good stuff.

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  • Link // 04.26.2007 // 5:20 PM // 1 Comment

    Helpful distortion at NYC & London subway maps

    Having just been in London for the first time, I was really fascinated by the “helpful distortion” in the Tube map. It’s a brilliant design decision to have the Underground map not necessary that related to the overground geography that makes the Tube map so simple to read and understand. It’s a simple solution, but it took a bold decision to make it happen — most people simply aren’t comfortable with the lack of geographical relationship between stations and compared to overground landmarks. The proposed NYC “Kick map” is possibly even better — a really great solution that will probably never get implemented.

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  • Link // 03.23.2007 // 5:06 PM // 0 Comments

    Modest Maps: A Clean Slate for Your Maps

    A BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps (Yahoo, Google, etc.) in Flash, written in ActionScript 2.0. Basically, this gives you a totally clean map, with no default display for markers, widgets, etc. — so that you can build the interface bits as you wish, rather than being beholden to the ones Yahoo, Google, and the others give you out of the box. Great idea.

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  • Link // 12.01.2006 // 5:30 AM // 0 Comments

    Put a marker on Google Earth the old-fashioned way.

    Classic (Warning: geek joke ahead).

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  • Link // 05.02.2006 // 11:30 PM // 5 Comments

    Where’s Tim Hibbard?

    Tim is a guy from Lawrence, KS (where I live) who geo-locates himself at all times. At any moment, you can find out where Tim is with this Google maps UI. You can debate whether or not this is something you’d want, security and privacy-wise, but you can’t

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  • Link // 04.26.2006 // 3:09 PM // 0 Comments

    Nice Google maps UI

    An interface idea we’ve talked about at work, done quite well: Google maps that don’t try to cram all the point data into the silly little bubble. The map shows the point, but the data is on the right. Nicely done.

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