Here are a few flavors of a technique, illumination cartography, that uses data to shed light on its underlying basemap. There’s something satisfying about presenting a phenomenon as revealing geography rather than obscuring it.
0:00 Illuminating intro
0:06 Adding some lighthouses from ArcGIS Online
0:16 Firefly point symbology
0:49 Darkening the underlying imagery basemap with Effects
1:11 Illuminating with the Soft Light blend mode
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0:00 Ravishing introduction
0:28 Firing up the viewshed tool in ArcGIS Online
1:24 The viewshed result
1:36 Viewshed as an illumination source
3:24 Creating buffers as a scale reference
4:17 Adding basemap labels
4:41 Manually labeling buffer distances
5:41 Bonus footage
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0:00 Pretty standard intro, really
0:06 The data
0:18 Darkening the basemap
0:42 Line symbology and overlay blend to illuminate
1:55 Light saber style lines to sit atop the map
2:55 Bonus footage
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Love, John
Adventures In Mapping 