The darkness is easy enough to fix: Just turn down the opacity a bit. I agree with - Max -: at the size you're going to be showing these, the simpler...
It just means that if you use one of those textures, you cannot distribute the resulting map under a Creative Commons (CC) license. You can still do...
Sprite is a term that comes from the video game world, referring to a 2d graphic applied in screen space. (As opposed to applied to an object in a 3d...
The way I generally go about it is I create my overview map, then when I want to make a larger scale map, I bring my overview map into the document,...