Mapping Center

We’ve posted our recently revised Color Ramps version 2.0 styles on our site to be more suitable for your use. Our impetus was we needed something new to work on a project. We were working on a printed map of Washington Landforms that we will talk about in our "One Minute Cartographer" session at the ESRI User Conference this year. This presentation will be posted on the Mapping Center - Other Resources page after the conference. The color ramp used on this map was selected from the PNW_x set in the new Hypsometry style. (PNW stands for "Pacific Northwest".)

Basically, we found that our previous version of Color Ramps was now cumbersome and as such due for some streamlining. So, here's what happened in a nutshell. We had a desired result for the design in mind when we started. It's worth mentioning that we often admire the Raven Maps style of hillshade, certainly an inspiration for the final results, but not the only source for all the Color Ramps. Since we were changing one style why not go ahead and try for a more sensible approach with the contents of the remaining ones as well? We removed duplicates, arranged related groups and made sure that the category field was empty. The category field for color ramps is a known issue -- if you fill it, the ramps become unavailable.

From Several Color Ramps to Four Choices

With the design focus settled, we evaluated what the themes were for the styles and chose:

1. Hypsometry - where we batched up both terrestrial and bathymetry ramps -- that's where we started and where the Washington Landform color ramps were added;







2. CartoEffects - used for gradiant borders [see the Crater Lake map];



3. Events - which became significantly larger - but we dedicated the style to be used for environmental events, such as Active Fires, Gradual events like desertification, Seasonal and Water Events;



4. Hillshades - where we placed ramps that are used to create Area Specific hillshades - that could be mono or bicolor, multi or for lighting effects.

Using a Existing Color Ramp to Make a New One

Do you need to start from scratch every time you make a hillshade color ramp? No, but you do need to consider what you're using and make copies of existing ramps to use as your work-in-progress. One example is the specific area ramp that started this process. We took an existing style from version 1.0 and copied it into the new version, in this case we started with the Ramp named Europe_Italy. We kept the structure of the five algorithmic color ramp, and that was important because we already had our map project very near completion --and the hillshading was already established as the five part ramp. If we changed the numbers for the structure at this point, we would have a substantial amount of editing to do from a color aspect. So we made a series of modified ramps starting with the name PNW_1.00 and continued to make several variations. Here is some online help for working with color ramps.