Mapping Center

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...

A common question that we get on Mapping Center is how to create an elevation legend in ArcMap. In September of 2007, there was a blog entry on Mapping Center (Creating a legend for hypsometrically tinted shaded relief) that outlined a method for creating a legend for hypsometrically tinted shaded relief. When that blog was written, the option to Convert Graphics to Features was not yet available. This blog outlines a simpler method for creating an elevation legend using this new option (version 9.3 and later). Read More...

From time to time I hear from users or see postings indicating that they find the various states data frames can have a bit confusing.

Data frames on the layout can be active, selected, focused or some combination (or none) of the above. Read More...

I don’t hear this so much from cartographers and GIS professionals as I do from nearly everybody else who has to read our maps, “I didn’t even read the text on the map’. Matt Baker’s recent post addresses one of the most common causes, overly wide paragraphs, and I’ll cover another here, which is the size of text. 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...

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...

We recently received a question about legends on Ask a Cartographer, so I thought we should post a blog describing some of the cartographic guidelines for legends that may help you make decisions about their design.  Here are some tips -- first related to page titles and legend titles, then some that are more general, and finally related to grouping items in legends: Read More...

This question comes in fairly regularly at Ask A Cartographer, so I felt it was time to add a brief blog to use for future queries.  This issue is a common one, and is the topic of a Knowledge Base article that describes the basic steps needed to solve the problem.  The value added here is a bit more discussion as to why this is a necessary workflow. Read More...

We received a suggestion to write a blog entry on this topic from Anna Schwabedal, who is a technical sales representative for ESRI Germany.  Anna gave us a rough idea of how this works and I was able to use that when this topic came up through Ask a Cartographer recently, and I've worked on it a bit more since in order to write this. Read More...

Here's a question that has, in various forms, been posed on Ask a Cartographer:  "I have a map that has a hillshade and a DEM drawn with transparency on top of it. I cannot figure out how to make a legend that properly shows the final colors on my map." Read More...