Quickly Create Maps For The Web: TileMill

Hope you did not miss our recent post on use of maps in website designs as major trends in 2011 where we discussed how maps are being used creatively for many different purposes. Whether you are designing for a location based service or playing with maps in your website, there are a number of useful mapping tools available online for free (some of those have already been shared here). Today, we are sharing another useful mapping tool for designers.

TileMill is a tool for designers to design and integrate maps with custom data quickly and easily on the web. It is built on the powerful open-source map rendering library Mapnik.

TileMill can also export directly to the SQLite-based MBTiles file format for offline maps. It also gives you full control on style and layout (colors, layers, fonts etc.) to customize maps as per your requirements.

Major Features

• Access datasources on the local filesystem or through Amazon S3
• Manage map layers with file-based datasources (shapefiles, rasters)
• Preview map tiles instantly while editing stylesheets
• Inspect datasource field values and data types
• Export maps to PNG, PDF and MBTiles formats

TileMill is actually intended for cartographer but you can master it with a little effort to design simple maps for your personal usage.