Mapping Center

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...

One of the most frequently recurring topics on Mapping Center is what to do with stacks or clusters of point features on maps. In August 2007, I wrote a blog posting on how to use Maplex to display coincident points, and this worked for some scenarios, but not all. 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...

Indicating that a street is one-way and which way is valid to travel was a lot harder than it should have been prior to version 9.2.  At 9.2, the new representations symbology makes this a much faster and easier task.  To create this effect, you will need to have your street line data stored in a geodatabase which is a requirement for using representation symbology.

You will also need to have a field in your data that indicates whether a street is one-way. This also depends on the digitized direction of the street lines to align the arrows in the correct direction. If your streets are not digitized correctly, you can edit them by selecting each feature, set the Edit task to Modify Feature, then right click on the feature and choose Flip. Read More...