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...

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...

We got a good question on Ask a Cartographer this morning.  The gist of the question was how to go about symbolizing street centerlines so they could be drawn using line symbol widths that reflected, at scale, the actual width of the road (as shown in the image to the left). This is a good cartographic solution because varying the line width adds hierarchy to the roads -otherwise it would be hard for you map reader to know which are wider or more heavily used. Read More...

The map excerpt shown at right (click on it to see the details) shows an example of hollow cased roads.  The map is from a mosaic of USGS DRG image files.  The map specification requires that the cased road symbol contains a transparent gap.  The examples shown below were created with ArcMap 9.2 and used cartographic representations to re-create the effect on the USGS DRG map. Read More...

Symbolizing road overpasses or underpasses typically requires that you perform two data preparation steps.  First, identify which roads overpass other roads.  This may be very simple intersections between two roads, or it may include many other roads when dealing with complex highway interchanges.  Second, represent the interchanges clearly.  This task may mean simply changing feature or layer drawing order, or it can also mean knocking out or masking portions of underpassing features.  The image to the left shows the underpassing highway being masked by an overpassing street and railroad. Read More...

This is the first of three parts that cover how to symbolize roads with cased line symbols.  This first part will cover how to symbolize road centerline data so that the symbols look good, the second part will cover data modeling and symbolizing underpass/overpass relationships, and the third part will deal with symbolizing cul-de-sacs versus dead-end streets.  The primary inspiration for this task is the design of the USGS 1:24,000-scale topographic quadrangle maps. To the left is an example from the 1952 Manchester, New Hampshire map. Read More...

A number of maps, particularly those geared towards outdoor tourism, rely on a convention that uses standard icons to list the services or amenities that are available at some place on the map. Using cartographic representations simplifies what used to be a rather unwieldy task from the perspectives of data modeling, data management, and symbology. Read More...

Dash-dot line symbols for polygon outlines should be displayed in a way that consistently shows the pattern of dashes and dots and clearly shows the shape of the polygon. In ArcGIS, a multi-layer line symbol is required. One layer is a cartographic line symbol with a dash pattern.  The second is a marker line symbol that shows a marker (the dot) with a complementary pattern to the dashes. Read More...