Mapping Center

Hi, folks— I have never blogged before so forgive me if I ramble on too much. I have been working with ESRI to convert ideas and snippets of code from my past work presented at the ESRI International User Conferences into a usable set of tools for all to use. This is a great honor indeed, and I thank them for the opportunity. My ideas on landscape presentation have now taken on a life of their own as a set of tools in an ArcToolbox that you can download from Mapping Center. I hope others will find them easy and fun to use. To learn more about them you can read two blog entries that were posted earlier: Introducing the ArcGIS Bump Map Tools and Symbolizing the Bump Map. Read More...

Tree symbols are a great way to enhance the appearance of a large scale, detailed map. To make attractive point symbols for trees, you need a good place to start from and thankfully all of us ArcGIS users have that. Using multi-layer character marker sybmols, the variety of tree symbols you can create is endless. This blog is meant to introduce (or reintroduce) you to the ESRI US Forestry 2 font. It is also meant to give you some tips for creating a variety of tree symbols to use on your maps. Read More...

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 with the topic of Washington Landforms and it is specific to printed maps. This is a map 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".) Read More...

It is often useful to use a hillshade raster to show terrain to support other information in a map such as an analytical surface like population density, or a thematic overlay like soils. There is one significant problem with this; however, which is that the shading from the hillshade modifies the colors of the main information layer making them artificially dark or washed out. That makes map reading and applying what you learn from a legend a frustrating task. For example, the legend for the map on the left is shown at the right--it's hard to figure anything out with so many similar colors in the legend and the added effect of varied gray tones within each soil polygon on the map. (One way you can help your map readers is to Read More...

In the first dot density mapping blog, we discussed the workflow for creating dot density maps using ArcMap. In that discussion we emphasized the need for using exclusion or inclusion layers. Here is an example of how we set up the inclusion and exclusion choices for mapping population density in San Bernardino County, the county with the largest land area in the conterminous United States. Because of its size and the fact that population is not evenly distributed throughout the county (rather, it is concentrated in the southwest corner, around where Redlands is located), this county exemplifies the limitations of dot density mapping without inclusions/exclusions when mapping population density at the county, the state or even the country level. Read More...