Yesterday, I picked up an interesting link on QGIS IRC: mapbox.com – “Create beautiful custom maps using open source tools in the cloud”.

Mapbox tile "Word Dark"

MapBox provides open source tools and services for creating and using custom maps. They also design tilesets and host them for free. Currently, there are tiles featuring world maps, maps of the U.S., Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

You can integrate MapBox’s tiles into websites using Google Maps or OpenLayers. For example, in OpenLayers creating a new layer for their “World Dark” tiles would look like this:

var layer = new OpenLayers.Layer.MapBox(
   "World Dark",
   { 'layername': layername,
      'osm': 0,
      'type': file_extension,
      'serverResolutions': [156543.0339,78271.51695,39135.758475,19567.8792375,9783.93961875,4891.96980938,2445.98490469,1222.99245234,611.496226172,305.748113086,152.874056543,76.4370282715,38.2185141357,19.1092570679,9.55462853394,4.77731426697,2.38865713348,1.19432856674,0.597164283371],
      'resolutions': [156543.0339,78271.51695,39135.758475,19567.8792375,9783.93961875,4891.96980938,2445.98490469,1222.99245234,611.496226172,305.748113086,152.874056543,76.4370282715]
   }
);