Mapping Center

Early last month Chris Sergent forwarded me an email via Mapping Center's submit a blog entry feature.  Chris, who is a developer, was looking to connect with other ESRI developers. The spirit of Chris's email struck me as something we could all do with a little more of, so we put Chris's post up on the ESRI Developer Summit blog Read More...

We've added new site-wide search functionality to Mapping Center.  As our content and audience continue to grow, we will continue our efforts to make it easy to quickly find the information you need. Read More...

Which are the 30 or 500 most important of Minnesota’s famous 10,000 lakes?  Next, think about that question from the point of view of making a zoom-able map of the U.S. and how many lakes need to be shown as you zoom in.  That question boils down to how to decide which polygons to show.  Not all polygons are created equally, some are roughly round, some are banana shaped (like ox-bow lakes) some have lots of prongs (like a reservoir formed by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dam), some are long and twisty like a pretzel. Read More...

Keeping track of scale ranges at which a layer will be visible when a map has a few scale ranges and dozens of other layers can quickly become mind-boggling. This entry describes a strategy for using ArcMap's Table Of Contents (TOC) to create these maps and effectively manage all those layers and scales. Read More...

So, you have just spent a few minutes deep in concentration setting up your labeling rules and applied them.  ArcMap's little globe is spinning, spinning... spinning... and nothing.  Several of your labels didn't draw. Panic and go to MappingCenter. Right?

Not exactly. 

There are a few things we always do when diagnosing the "where's my label" scenarios, no matter what's being labeled or what labeling engine is being used.  Read More...

We recently received a question about legends on Ask a Cartographer, so I thought we should post a blog describing some of the cartographic guidelines for legends that may help you make decisions about their design.  Here are some tips -- first related to page titles and legend titles, then some that are more general, and finally related to grouping items in legends: Read More...

Recently we were asked if there are any cartographic standards for inset maps. Here are a few guidelines:

Purpose

First, consider why the inset map is needed. Inset maps are sometimes used to show related themes of data at smaller scales, for example: Read More...