Improvements to borders on Google Maps

There are a few new visual tweaks that have just gone live on Google Maps:

- Cleaner rendering of country borders, making them look less blurry
- Less prominent rendering of province borders in France, making it easier to distinguish countries/provinces and follow roads
- Better road thinning in France, making it easier to tell major from minor roads
- Improved label density, making the map more legible by removing minor cities from far zooms following the less is more rule :-)

Improvements to POI rendering on Google Maps

I was looking over some of our map tiles from last year, and thought it would be interesting to show how we have improved the rendering of points of interest (POIs). There are a whole bunch of subtle changes to the icons, placement, and visual style that we implemented, resulting in a map that's much more useful and easier to read. Things to notice:

- Better POI placement, with icons aligned with roads & labels avoiding roads
- More road names shown, due to less label collision
- Clearer distinction between different data types (building numbers, roads, POIs)
- Better choice of icons for POIs

(On the left are the tiles from last year, on the right are the current ones):