Mapping Community
By Kenneth Field, Esri Research Cartographer
In the lead up to London’s big sporting event in July 2012, the symbolic torch will travel the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. The route has been designed to maximize the opportunity for the UK population to view the torch as it makes its way, across 70 days, stopping at over 1000 locations where bearers will parade the torch locally. The torch relay event web map provides a time aware window on the event for locals to follow and for more distant observers to explore.
By Kenneth Field, Esri Research Cartographer
Tourist trail maps engage people new to an area and guide them to sights of importance or interest, often using a particular theme. The Esri story maps team recently published a trail map of New York City’s High Line and also a short walking tour around Esri’s Redlands campus. Both examples illustrate the way in which web maps allow you to combine basemaps, route information, point of interest markers and multimedia (e.g. photographs) to tell a rich visual story. Web maps like these can be used either as a virtual tour to give a narrative without actually visiting the area, or as a navigation aid as users follow the trail in reality using a hand-held device. In this blog entry, we’ll look at how you can make a walking trail web map.
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By Kenneth Field, Research Cartographer, and Damien Demaj, Online Cartographic Product Engineer
We all have favorite maps that we think are great, but rather than just saying a map looks great, how many of us are able to take a critical look at it, evaluate it, and explain why it looks great? Having the ability to reflect on and evaluate maps as information products is important to understanding effective cartographic design so you can optimize communication of the intended message in your own maps as well as be able to understand why other maps work. In this blog entry, we’ll briefly look at some static maps and a web map to see what we think makes them great and then show you how using a checklist gives you the tools to reflect on maps in the same way.
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By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead
In ArcGIS, symbols are used not only to draw and label geographic features, but also to display various map elements, such as legends, scale bars and north arrows. They are also used to display any graphics you may add to the map, such as bounding boxes, logos, and text.
Because they are used so extensively, you may sometimes want to create your own symbols. Before you do this, it would be helpful to understand the basic building blocks of symbols.
There are three primary building blocks—fonts, colors, and pictures. To help you gain a deeper understanding of these basic building blocks and how they are used in ArcGIS symbols, we have written a series of three blog posts, each of which is dedicated to one of the building blocks.
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By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead, and John Cranfill, Esri Product Engineer
There are three primary building blocks of standard symbols in ArcGIS—colors, fonts, and pictures. Previous blog entries discussed fonts and colors in ArcGIS symbols. This post discusses pictures used in marker, line, and fill symbols. It reviews the file formats that can be used for pictures and explains tiled picture fill symbols and special considerations for creating them. It also discusses what happens when you share ArcGIS documents that use pictures for symbols.
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By Wes Jones, Esri Design Cartographer
This blog entry is about maps and infographics. A map takes a very complex thing, the earth, and cartographically represents it so you can more easily understand it. An infographic takes information—the more complex, the better—and graphically represents it so you can more easily understand it. The two have much in common. This entry explains how to make a comparative distance line infographic that shows how far features are from a baseline that represents a geographic entity. The example here is the distance of cities from the coast in Australia (the mainland).
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By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead, and Jeremy Wright, John Cranfill, and Michael Grossman, Product Engineers
There are three primary building blocks of standard symbols in ArcGIS—fonts, colors, and graphic files. In a previous article, we discussed fonts in ArcGIS symbols, and in an upcoming article we will tackle the issue of pictures. In this article, we discuss colors in ArcGIS symbols, including color models and how they are used to define colors in ArcGIS, and the differences between their color gamuts. We wrap up with a set of tips for working with color in ArcGIS.
By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead, and Simon Woo, Raster Product Engineer
With the update to the ArcGIS blogs as a result of creating a single blog that reflects ArcGIS as a system, you can now find more easily useful map-related information in posts from some of the other teams.
In this blog entry, we point out a number of posts that have been published on the Imagery blog that may be of interest to the Mapping Community. And conversely I note a number of Mapping blog posts that may be useful to the Imagery community. These blog posts will now appear if you search in either the Imagery or the Mapping category.
By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead
Atlas of Design is a forthcoming publication dedicated to furthering the art and craft of cartography through inspirational examples. As noted by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the organization that is editing and publishing the atlas:
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By Jaynya Richards, Esri Research Cartographer
We just added to Esri’s Mapping Center ArcGIS Resources – Styles page a style that contains newly updated cartographic symbols for the National Park System (NPS). Tom Patterson, NPS Harper’s Ferry Center (HFC) cartographer, shared the symbol files with us, and we used them to create this ArcGIS 10 style, its five associated Esri fonts, and three associated graphic files. With this style, you can use the most current NPS symbology on your maps.
