Mapping Center

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...

Need to add a quick locator map to your page layout? Want to spice things up a bit? Try this locator map – it has visual appeal because of the 3D appearance (promoted by the choice of projection and the gradient fill). There are just a few basic steps to creating this map: 1) Prepare the data to make the map, 2) create the map, 3) add your area of interest (optional), and 4) export the data used to make the map, if desired (this will save some drawing time for you.)

Note that this is a technique you would want to use only if your area of interest is large enough to be seen on the map, and it is best used when you want the map reader to get an idea of where in the world your area of interest is located. 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...

Recently, a new version of ColorBrewer called ColorBrewer 2 (colorbrewer2.org) was released by Axis Maps (www.axismaps.com). ColorBrewer is a web tool for selecting colors for maps. The original ColorBrewer was released in 2002, and the update incorporates comments that the developers, Dr. Cynthia Brewer of Penn State University and Dr. Mark Harrower of University of Wisconsin Madison (he used to be a grad student at Penn State), have received over the years. Here are what some of the new features are. 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...

Bad maps, unlike bad press, do not garner the sort of attention that can be capitalized upon.  Bad maps are strong impediments to gaining mind share, and represent a significant risk to depleting mind share.  Why? Bad maps are a visual, i.e., strong communication method, and convey incompetence and poor judgment.

To many of us this is obvious, but we consistently hear from people who are professionals, who have to make maps. Read More...

Occasionally I'm asked to come into a project to introduce some cartographic thinking into work that ordinarily might not have much. I spent most of last week with some folks who know water utility GIS. I helped by designing a status map, and took some of that work to make some improvements to an editing map and a mobile map. The status map needed to be a multi-scale base map that showed the water network data (mains, valves, meters, etc.), and the status of assets and water service.  Many different people within a water department, local government, or even the public might see the map. This map had to be functional, attractive, and free of obvious  errors and awkward symbol or labeling choices. 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...

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...

One of the first and best rules in cartographic design is to beg, borrow, or steal good design. Many good ideas have already been had, and there's no point in ignoring them. 

Today, I got a note from one of our senior folks in sales and marketing at ESRI who had been rightfully accosted by one of our customers over some maps that appeared in an ESRI brochure called Government Matters. Several pages in there are a series of U.S. county level demographic maps with Alaska and Hawaii un-artfully integrated into northern Mexico. 

How would I have solved this problem? Read More...

Buffer vignettes symbolize the interface between two areas. They are often used to show the land-water interface by gradually fading blue at the coast into white or vice versa. You can also use them to fade the map out into a white background. These types of vignettes are created using buffers that are symbolized in a special way.

Note -- as described this only works on white backgrounds. See the two examples at the end to see how the data frame's background can be coordinated with the buffer vignette for different effects on along coastlines. Read More...

We mentioned a few tips about legend design in our session called "The One Minute Cartographer" at the 2008 ESRI User Conference. (The PowerPoint presentation is available for download on the Other Resources page.) We decided to share those tips and some general guidance on legends here since some of you have been asking about legends lately on Ask a Cartographer. Read More...

Not long ago we found a workflow that demonstrated how convenient it would be to be able to copy a representation class. The situation arose as we were creating a map service for a map that had been designed for print. The problem was that many of the symbols were too small and detailed to be seen clearly on screen. Our symbols were already cartographic representations, so we didn't want to edit them (to make them larger) because we still needed them to produce our print map. We also didn't want to have to create and manage an extra copy of our data just to manage one additional attribute (the one added for representations). Read More...

An aspect-slope map simultaneously shows the aspect (direction) and degree (steepness) of slope for a terrain (or other continuous surface).  Aspect categories are symbolized using hues (e.g., red, orange, yellow, etc.) and degree of slope classes are mapped with saturation (or brilliance of color) so that the steeper slopes are brighter.  This will result in a map that has the colors shown to the right. Read More...