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...

Depending on the type of highway you are labeling (interstate highway, U.S. route highway, or state route highway), the standard highway shield symbol may or may not be wide enough for all the characters in your labels.

Often, you do not get the desired outcome by simply using one shield for all highway number labels because one size rarely fits all! The numbers look “squished” or they overrun the shield symbol when there are more than two characters (depending on how large you make the shield and the characters).

Here are some tricks you can use to create highway shields for labels of varying widths, especially when there are more than two characters in some of the highway names. 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...

I frequently come across data which has lost data links (a red !). This occurs when the data has been moved or no longer exists, thus breaking the link. On some occasions, even after I tracked down the data and repaired the data source, the symbology still didn’t draw -- it exists, but the wrong field is listed on the Layer Properties Symbology tab. Usually the draw category (Value field) has defaulted to a non-matching field. Simply changing the Value field does not do the trick. Read More...

Most maps should have some depiction of hydrography.  The problem is, if you're not familiar with the data or the typical symbology conventions, it is hard to find the time to make the required effort. 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...

I was recently asked to lend a cartographic hand to a project my agency is working on. I work for OregonMetro (the Metropolitan Planning Agency in the Portland, Oregon area) and among other things, we are charged with planning the future of the region. One of the facets of the planning program involves helping the 25 cities in our jurisdiction collaboratively plan for future growth. We have identified 39 urban centers and we defined a list of urban amenities that have been shown to have a positive impact on residential pricing and convenience or family-oriented amenities. These include the following: Read More...

Last week we received a request for blog entry on a 3D effect we could provide for displaying building footprints using cartographic representations. The most common, and simplest effect is to add a drop shadow like what is shown in the image to the right. Read More...

Yesterday I got an email from a long time colleague showing me an online map and asking, “When will it be possible to do this map with ArcGIS”? The map is the interactive map of Washington DC at http://dc.everyblock.com. In particular my friend was looking at the crime map wondering how the proportional symbols showing crimes became disaggregated as he zoomed in, eventually showing individual crime sites. 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...

Not too long ago we received a question on Ask a Cartographer about symbolizing polygons with a scalloped edge (like the old ArcInfo hardwire line symbol). Hoping to do better (scallop lines were a nice idea, but they didn't always turn out as good as I would have liked, so I rarely used them), I started experimenting with the options in representation symbology. I'm happy to report that there is a better solution. Read More...

After seeing my poster that described using dot maps to show soils at the AAG conference in Boston a few weeks ago, Charlie Frye suggested that I write this entry to describe my maps and the technique used to create them.  This seemed especially appropriate given the recent entries in this blog about dot maps. Read More...