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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Hypsometric tinting (also called layer tinting, elevation tinting, elevation coloring or hypsometric coloring) is used to enhance elevation zones so map readers can better see differences in relief.  You can think of it as ''coloring between the lines'' where the lines are contours (lines of equal elevation) or isobaths (lines of equal depth ...

If you're making a map that is either a large format print map or a map that will be served via ArcGIS Server, squeezing every bit of wasted time out of drawing performance is critical.  Don't get tired of sitting there drinking extra cups of coffee watching the word ''Drawing'', all your layer names, and that little blue globe. If you're ...