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 symbols, the variety of tree symbols you can create is endless. This blog is meant to introduce ...

While anyone can use GIS tools to make a map, not everyone has a background in proper map design and cartographic theory. If decisions are based on inaccurate or misleading maps, the results can be disastrous. Creating and Publishing Maps with ArcGIS is a new instructor-led course from ESRI that prepares GIS users to successfully ...

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 ...

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. We were working on a printed map of Washington Landforms that we will talk about in our ''One Minute Cartographer'' session at the ESRI User Conference this year. This ...

Recently, a new version of ColorBrewer called ColorBrewer 2.0 (colorbrewer2.org) was released by Axis Maps. 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 ...

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 ...

Cartography: an introduction. ISBN 978-0-904482-23-2 UK Price £4.99 (US Price $10.00, including postage and packing). Available online at http://www.cartography.org.uk/. In 2006 The British Cartographic Society (BCS) launched its Better Mapping Campaign providing a series of seminars on how to produce better maps. The series was repeated in ...

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 ...