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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. The data source for the soil ...