USA States Etymology Map

Here's a little Google Map I created to show the meaning of the names given to each of the states in the USA. The origins of the names of U.S. states have been taken from this Wikipedia entry.

As fun as it is to read the meaning behind the names for the U.S. states the map is really a demo to show how you can use the new Styled Map option in the Google Maps API to remove the name labels from Google Maps.

Removing the labels with Styled Maps is easy enough. It is just a matter of turning off the visibility of options in the administrative layer. However once I'd removed the names from Google Maps I then had to figure out how to add my own labels. Luckily Marc Ridey has written an excellent Label class for Google Maps V3.

If you have a look at the example I've created you can see my design isn't very pretty. The next stage is to play with the font weight and font size to create something a little easier on the eye.