Mapping Center

We recently got a question on Ask a Cartographer that related to the use of a restricted color ramp.  The person asked, "Is there an easy way that I can make all the counties in one state variations on one hue, but each state a different colour so that the map readers can easily distinguish between states and counties?" The solution is a restricted color ramp and it can be used in many different situations. For example, on this web site it is used to differentiate the various world regions (not exactly continents as Japan is a separate region and most of Indonesia is grouped with Australia) Read More...

I don’t hear this so much from cartographers and GIS professionals as I do from nearly everybody else who has to read our maps, “I didn’t even read the text on the map’. Matt Baker’s recent post addresses one of the most common causes, overly wide paragraphs, and I’ll cover another here, which is the size of text. Read More...

As a judge for the Map Gallery at the Annual ESRI International User Conference, and the Cartographer for the ESRI Map Book, I am fortunate enough to see what many of you are doing with ArcGIS to create printed maps.

This year, one issue I frequently noted was very wide columns of text.  Below is an example, and the reason it doesn't work is that it is hard to make your eye track along the long lines of text and then reliably find the next line. As presented, the text below almost guarantees that nobody will bother reading Read More...