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. ...

New in ArcGIS 9.3: you can send error reports to ESRI any time ArcGIS crashes. Software crashes are a serious software quality issue. Our goal is to eliminate them. The folks on our development teams wanted to explain why crash reporting was added and why it can help build better software for you: We know crashes are frustrating to you and when ...

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The ESRI Map Book has become an annual must-have collectors item for ESRI International User Conference attendees and GIS users alike. The twenty-third volume of the ESRI Map Book showcases the innovative and inspiring accomplishments of GIS users around the world. The true excitement of this book lies in the discovery of which maps have made ...

ArcGIS 9.3 has hit the streets, meaning some of you should have it in hand this week, and most of you will have it in the coming weeks. After you get it installed definitely read the What's new in ArcGIS 9.3 PDF [13Mb] (it also installed with ArcGIS 9.3 at C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Documentation\Whats_New_In_ArcGIS_93.PDF). Use the text search ...

This spring, we have caught up with many of you at a number of conferences.  The presentations we gave at the conferences are now posted on the Other Resources page here on Mapping Center. Here's a rundown of our latest activities... In April, we attended the Association of American Geographers meeting in Boston. There we gave a presentation ...

We recently made some changes to the color ramp styles on Mapping Center under the ArcGIS Resources tab. You will now find a single ZIP file that contains a variety of color ramps. Our purpose in reorganizing the color ramps was to make it easier to find and use the color ramps.   The way we did that was to organize all the color ramps ...

Early last month Chris Sergent forwarded me an email via Mapping Center's submit a blog entry feature.  Chris, who is a developer, was looking to connect with other ESRI developers. The spirit of Chris's email struck me as something we could all do with a little more of, so we put Chris's post up on the ESRI Developer Summit blog. Last ...

We've added new site-wide search functionality to Mapping Center.  As our content and audience continue to grow, we will continue our efforts to make it easy to quickly find the information you need.  The Mapping Center site has three search engines: one for Ask A Cartographer, one for the Blog, and the new Site Search.  ...