268 Different Colourful Tiles – Plain Tile Maker

Plain Tile Maker was my weekend project – a mapping tile service that serves one colour tiles as a tile basemap.
There are about 268 colours to choose from – basically anything that the underlying library (Imagemagick) supports.
It was developed for me to play around on the Heroku platform, and as a response to a GeoCommons.com user question, where the user wanted a way to show just a plain one colour background.
This solution is more flexible, and really easy.

The format is

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colorname/X/Y/Z.png

So for example,

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/DodgerBlue/0/0/0.png

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/bisque/12/3/32.png

And in return you get a 256×256 sized image of that colour.

DodgerBlue

bisque

You can use it in your mapping libraries, for example: With OpenLayers:

var colourTile = new OpenLayers.Layer.XYZ(
 "Plain Colour Tile",
 "http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colourName/${z}/${x}/${y}.png", 
 { sphericalMercator: true,
 buffer: 1,
 numZoomLevels: 17
 }
);

And with Leaflet:

new L.TileLayer('http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colourName/{x}/{y}/{z}.png', {maxZoom: 18});

Or you can add them to GeoCommons quite easily. Add

http://plaintiles.herokuapp.com/colorName/{X}/{Y}/{Z}.png

in the Add a URL link, choosing Map Tile URL from the format, and then give it a nice name when prompted.

Here’s the Bisque tiles in GeoCommons.

I’ve used the in a map it to give a ghosting effect over the basemap, and to just show my own boundaries. http://geocommons.com/maps/181231 is a map made with some World Boundaries over the plain bisque map we had just added. I’ve also overlaid the Acetate Labels layer on top for context.