Contour lines show you the overall terrain of a place by connecting equal elevation (or whatever data you happen to be mapping). They do a lot of things well, like showing the angle and steepness of a slope, and providing a sense of the landscape’s roughness and topographic general patterns. But there’s a bit of … Continue reading How to make illuminated (Tanaka) contours in ArcGIS Pro
Adding a hillshade terrain to your basemap can give the map reader incredible amounts of information about the surface of the earth. But it’s also a mechanism for adding visual charm and interest to a map! With emotional resonance and technical merit bound up together in such a way, how can you possibly resist that … Continue reading Vintage retro hand-drawn-ish hillshade in ArcGIS Pro
The Vector Tile Style Editor lets you remove, splice, and restyle vector basemap content to your heart’s content. Sometimes my heart isn’t content until I’ve added a little bit of a texture pattern to a basemap. Like the cute little dappled sunlit water pattern here… Here’s how you can tell an AI just who you … Continue reading How to make textured basemaps with AI, the VTSE, and your wits
I’ll be in a mad dash at the San Diego Convention Center the week of the Esri UC. If you are attending, and have nothing better to do, consider catching one of these sessions I get to be a part of with some fantastic colleagues and Ken! Basemaps Are Not Just the Background Basemaps are … Continue reading Esri User Conference 2026
We geographers can dig pretty deep in the weeds of data collection and analysis, reveling in the fun of precision, process, statistics, even visualization. But when it comes to crafting the geographic message in the form of a map layout, sometimes we can feel a little overwhelmed. Out of place? I know I’ve been there. … Continue reading ArcGIS Pro Layout Redesign volume 2
I’ll be visiting Oslo Norway this May for a one-day cartographic workshop! Hope to see you there my Nordic map friends! Learn more about the workshop, here: https://www.geodata.no/kurs/kurs/gleden-ved-a-lage-kart Love, John Continue reading Cartography Workshop: 5 May 2026, Oslo Norway
Join Peter Atwood and me as we nerd out on maps in movies (and TV) in an “experts review” (I use that term loosely and reluctantly in my case) bonanza. We chat about what cinematic cartography gets right, what they might get wrong, and what we like about it all. 0:00 Intro0:27 Indiana Jones (check … Continue reading Expert Reviews MAPS in MOVIES
We in Michigan have been using our hand as the world’s most convenient cartographic resource since 1837. It gets a little gnarly when you include the Upper Peninsula, but that’s ok it still gets the job done. I’m an advocate of hand reference cartography for gesticulating your hometown to anyone remotely familiar with your state … Continue reading Michigan Hand Map Poster
Here’s a map poster made in ArcGIS Pro, and I’d like to tell you exactly how it was made. It sports cartoon-ized imagery, textures to make it look touchable, and overview globes that cast cute shadows. Here’s a how-to video, followed by step-by-step notes and links… 0:00 Melodious introduction0:23 Mis-using raster functions to make illustration-style … Continue reading How to enthingify maps with cartoon imagery and chunky overviews
Hey, check out the black labels for the black polygon features in this map! Oh, wait, you can’t read them. Ok, I’ll just switch them to white, like this: Foiled again! Now the white features’ labels are invisible. I suppose I could choose a neutral color like gray, but that would still be pretty hard … Continue reading How to make a layer’s labels readable over any background color
