Almost one year ago, I decided to take a crack at fixing something that bugged me in the way golf courses were rendered in carto. And now that fix – or what it evolved into – is finally merged and getting deployed!

If you look at the wiki page for leisure=golf_course, you’ll find a rich vocabulary for how to (micro)map many aspects of the layout: tees, holes, pins, bunkers, so on and so on. And in many of these tags, there’s an admonition: don’t tag for the renderer just to get these features to show up. Naturally, mappers will do what they want to do, and most fairways, greens, and bunkers have accompanying landuse=grass and natural=sand tags. In fact, in iD, creating a fairway, green, rough, or tee automatically adds landuse=grass to the tags. Likewise, bunkers add natural=sand.

This is useful for making a case that carto needs to render these tags, and that there’s a general agreement on what they should look like. After much back and forth and discussion in the PRs, a consensus emerged. golf=tee, fairway, driving_range, and rough would get the same fill color as landuse=grass. rough would also get a subtle pattern on top of its fill to highlight the different length of grass. The green would get a darker shade to differentiate it from the surrounding fairway, and so golf=green would get the same color as leisure=pitch. And golf=bunker would get a natural=sand color.

On top of that, agreement was reached on rendering golf=hole, a line that shows the playing path, along with a label of its ref or name. And finally, the actual location of the hole – golf=pin – would get an icon, labeled where applicable.

One final change was updating the fill of leisure=golf_course. The original green background was a single-use color. Carto is already a green-heavy color scheme, and the opportunity was taken to remove one shade, instead using the same color as campsites.

And so, as of carto 5.4.0, all of these details are now visible in the standard rendering. This can make a pretty big difference in how golf courses appear.

It’s not perfect, but in my eyes it’s a big improvement. One remaining criticism I have is that there’s not a lot of contrast between the new blue-green of a golf=green and the blue of a water hazard, so in some cases it can be difficult to discern the difference between where you’re putting and what you’re avoiding. But overall I’m very happy with the changes, and learned a lot about the considerations and thought process behind the colors and symbols in carto.

Follow up work would include getting iD to change its tag-suggestion behavior, and perhaps picking a new shade of leisure=pitch that’s a little bit further away from water. Of course, as I learned, even something as seemingly simple as changing some colors takes a lot of thought and consideration.

Thanks to Christoph Hormann, Paul Norman, Joseph E., and Paul Dicker. They were all extremely helpful offering feedback, answering beginner questions, and giving extra context on why decisions were made. This was my first PR, and I’m extremely happy to get it across the finish line.