If you installed a fresh copy of TileMill from the 0.3 series (we’re now up to 0.3.2), you may have noticed a new example stylesheet that comes included – ‘Open Streets DC’. By popular demand, this sample project shows off some of what TileMill can do at the street level, unlike the other examples that focus on world and country-level views.
Open Streets DC – data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA.
The project relies on shapefiles of OpenStreetMap data provided by CloudMade. While the example uses shapefiles covering just the District of Columbia, the style was created with more than just DC in mind. You could swap these out for CloudMade shapefiles of any part of the world and still get a nicely styled map.
For example, here is the same style applied to a section of Ontario, Canada:
Map of Ontario styled with Open Streets DC
To find shapefiles covering your area of interest, browse downloads.cloudmade.com and download any zip file with ‘shapefiles’ in the name. The comments in the project stylesheets will give you some pointers on how to prepare these shapefiles for use in TileMill.