memespring

Ive done a couple of designs for MySociety projects over the past month - Placeopedia.com and YourHistoryHere.com. Both use google maps (comming to everywhere near you soon), Placeopedia to georeference wikipedia articles, YourHistoryHere to map local history factoids.

The credit for all the difficult stuff goes to Sam Smith and Matthew Somerville.

As the sites are a pretty new concept the idea behind the design is to make it blindingly obvious what you can do with it on your first visit. i.e. add your information. As such there are only two buttons on the site - one to add, the other to show you (at random) what an added place looks like.

The only annoying thing with working with the maps from a design point of view is the limited  colours you can use. By the nature of the site the map dominates the page, so you are restricted to colours that go with it . Until google maps go SVG and you can use your own stylesheets there’s not much you can do.