Mapping Center

Sometimes you will find that some annotation you had thought you produced is missing. You can add this missing annotation into your existing annotation feature class without having to recreate all the annotation. The approach you take will depend on whether you are creating standard annotation or feature-linked annotation.

Standard annotation elements are pieces of geographically placed text that are not formally associated with features in the geodatabase. For example, you might have a piece of standard annotation that represents a mountain range—the annotation simply marks the general area on the map. Read More...

Recently, a group of us were annotating an online map that covers the contiguous United States at multiple scales. After a few weeks and many hours of annotation work, we came up with a list of tips that may be useful to you as well in your annotation editing. Read More...

As you zoom in (or out) of the online maps you see on Virtual Earth (VE) or Google Maps (GM), you are actually seeing a series of different maps with slightly different information displayed at each zoom level. Zoom level is indicated and controlled in an online map by the vertical zoom slider, like the one shown at the left in the image here. Whenever the zoom level is changed, a different map is shown.

Of course, these maps are well designed so that viewers are largely unaware that they are seeing these different maps. The foundation for good design of an “online map” hinges on understanding how to design for each of the zoom level represented in the entire online map. Colors, fonts, number of and types of features, etc. are all seriously considered when each of the maps is created for each of the zoom levels. Read More...

We’ve blogged about symbolizing hillshades (rasters that are derived from elevation raster datasets, like DEMs, via the Hillshade tool), but never really covered the basics of the data used to create hillshades, so we wanted to take a minute and share a few best practices we’ve been adopting.

Before getting started, though, it’s worth noting that we’ve been storing our rasters in file geodatabases. For us, these included some rather large hillshade datasets, ranging between 5Gb and 60Gb. Read More...

Want to get a graded boundary effect for your polygons layer? It’s pretty easy, really – you just need two layers – one for the fill, one for the outline. In essence you will end up placing the fill layer over the boundaries using transparency. The boundaries will be symbolized using a Gradient Fill Symbol with a gray to white color ramp. Here's how you would do this: Read More...

From time to time we are challenged by our users to try and re-create a cartographic effect that is seen on a map that you saw somewhere. In a recent Ask a Cartographer question we were asked how you could recreate the effect shown below in the excerpt from a histoical map.

In this blog entry, we describe how you can do that and we also recap some of the other methods we have used for symbolizing shorelines. We review methods that use both raster and vector data. Read More...

Cartography: an introduction. ISBN 978-0-904482-23-2 UK Price £4.99. Available online at www.cartography.org.uk.

In 2006 The British Cartographic Society (BCS) launched its Better Mapping Campaign providing a series of seminars on how to produce better maps. The series was repeated in 2008 in conjunction with The Association for Geographic Information and more are planned for 2009.

All but a few courses in Cartography have vanished in UK with the remainder being taught as a module within GIS courses. As mapping becomes a more valuable component in the assimilation and understanding of geographic data, it is even more relevant that those data are presented in clear and legible form. Cartography is all about communication and the effectiveness of that communication is determined by the quality of the map. Read More...