Wednesday, June 13, 2007 10:47 AM -
MappingCenterTeam
Gradient Fills Add Cartographic Allure
ESRI’s Graphics team needed some maps for a slide for one of this year’s Users Conference presentations to show where GIS was being used in K-12 programs in the U.S. and throughout the world. I was asked to spruce up the maps for the slide and was told these maps should be really simple because everyone in the audience would be looking for their country, or in the case of the U.S., their state or city, so no text would be needed, in fact just provide TIFF files of the maps.
I joined the K-12 data to the template data that ships with ArcGIS Desktop. You can usually find this in C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\bin\TemplatesData, I just used the states, countries, and world30 datasets. I was given a point shapefile for the U.S. data.
Design-wise, I knew they needed something eye-catching, but I was also challenged by trying to eliminate any extra lines on the map, e.g., polygon outlines. The graphics in this posting show two of the final maps.
I used gradient files to accomplish the effect in both maps. My inspiration came from those facetted globes you can sometimes find in gift shops in which different kinds of stone are used for each country or state.
For the city points on the U.S. maps, I made a graduated symbol map in which circle sizes represented the number of schools in a given school district and then I added stars (which are really hard to see in an image here because of its reduced size) for the district-wide programs. The fill symbols are linear gradient fills with the following properties.
Dark Blue Gradient Line Fill Symbol
Algorithmic Color Ramp:
Color 1: R: 0 G: 76 B: 115
Color 2: R: 115 G: 178 B: 255
Algorithm: Lab LCh
Angle 45:
Intervals: 100
Percentage: 100
Intent: have a more dramatic shift in the colors than what I used for the next two symbols, which served more like background for these maps. If you check the HSV settings for these colors, you’ll find that the value range is from 45% to 100%. |
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Light Blue Gradient Line Fill Symbol
Algorithmic Color Ramp:
Color 1: R: 191 G: 233 B: 255
Color 2: R: 209 G: 239 B: 255
Algorithm: HSV
Angle 45:
Intervals: 100
Percentage: 100
Intent: create symbols that could be distinguished by simply the subtle differences along the polygon edges. If you check the HSV settings you’ll see that the hue and value are the same, and only the saturation varies from 25% to 18%. |
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Light Gray Gradient Line Fill Symbol
Algorithmic Color Ramp:
Color 1: R: 255 G: 255 B: 255
Color 2: R: 240 G: 230 B: 230
Algorithm: HSV
Angle 135:
Intervals: 50
Percentage: 100
Intent: create a subtle symbol difference, but it couldn’t be the same as the light blue fill, so I flipped the angle for the gradient full and I used half the interval value. Also, to ‘warm up’ the gray, the Color 2 RGB value has a little more red. You can adjust a gray tone this way by setting its saturation to 2 to 6% and then setting a hue in the HSV Color properties. |
You can view the final slide to get an idea of what our Graphics team did with the maps I provided. I just provided high resolution images of the maps shown above and they did the rest. Pretty cool, I think.
Check out the Creating fill symbols topic in the ArcGIS 9.2 Desktop Help for details about creating fill symbols. This screen shot shows the Edit Color Ramp dialog box, I’ve clicked on Color 2 and chosen More Colors to show the Color Selector dialog box, which has a button at the upper left that allows you switch between color models. This is how I was able to change my colors using the HSV values for the HSV color model. You can also save custom colors to your personal style from this menu.
Posted by cfrye [Cartographic Effect] ( June 13, 2007 01:19 PM ) Permalink |
Almost as soon as we announced the availability of ESRI Press's reissue of the English translation of Eduard Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation, we started receiving some good and interesting questions. In the nearly four-plus years it took to complete this project, a number of rumors circulated that produced some of these questions. So, here are a few of those questions and our answers:
Q: The write-up on the ESRI Press page states, “This new edition of Cartographic Relief Presentation was edited for clarity and consistency,” what does that really mean?
A: The ESRI Press team found and fixed issues with punctuation and grammar. They did so, only when the meaning of a given sentence was clear; if the meaning was not immediately clear, then no change was made.
Q: Since the ESRI Press team was editing the text did we also consult the original German and re-translate any of the text?
A: No, ESRI Press did not obtain rights to do a new translation or a re-translation. ESRI Press obtained the publishing rights to the 1982 English translation which was published by Walter de Gruyter of Berlin directly from the Walter de Gruyter publishing company.
Q: One rumor was that ESRI Press obtained the original graphics plates for the book and used them in the new reissue; did that happen?
A: No, ESRI obtained a scan-turned-PDF of a pristine original book, including the cover. We did an OCR-scan on that to produce an editable version of the text, including captions. The vast majority of the graphics in the book come from that PDF; in a few cases we scanned some that were lower quality from another copy. ESRI Press typeset the OCR text with the goal of reconstructing a duplicate of the original. Page breaks were not changed as the original index was used. The final printing was done on nice bright offset paper; though the color plates were printed on gloss and bound with the book (the plates were loose in the back cover in the 1982 hard-bound edition).
Q: How did ESRI happen to undertake this project?
A: I remember standing with Christian Harder, then of ESRI Press and now a writer in ESRI's software products department, in the ESRI Store at the Users Conference in San Diego, lamenting a bit about our not being able to come through on publishing a cartography text with Borden Dent (I started that project with Borden in 1999, and his untimely passing in August of 2000 left the project uncompleted). I suggested that another route we (ESRI) might take would be to republish some of the classic, timeless, cartographic texts, and gave Cartographic Relief Presentation as a specific example. Christian and I couldn’t remember whether that conversation occurred in 2001 or 2002. From that point, Christian was the one who made things happen. He found a posting on Edward Tufte’s blog where Tufte extolled the virtues of the book. Christian corresponded with Tufte and became convinced of the value of republishing the book, and from there ESRI Press went about acquiring the rights from de Gruyter.
We expect more questions and insights will come up regarding the reissue of the English translation of Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation and so we invite you to post them as comments.
CF
