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 ...

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. Representations for 3D drop-shadow Once your building footprint data is in a geodatabase ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. New with 9.3 is a tool called Disperse Markers; it's in the Cartography toolbox, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last week we received an interesting question on Ask a Cartographer about how to create tapered stream or river line symbols. Tapered symbols are actually a bit more complicated than what is shown to the left; those lines are proportionally scaled symbols that are based on an attribute value. Notice that each stream is a single line width.  ...

Several weeks ago, after a colloquium given by Dr. Aileen Buckley on the devolution of cartographic theory, we approached her about research opportunities that she mentioned. She was glad to accept our help and put us in contact with Dr. A. Jon Kimerling from the Oregon State University. The research he was undertaking during his sabbatical in ...