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 introduction
0:23 Mis-using raster functions to make illustration-style imagery
(more on that trick here, and download the source NASA image here)
1:27 Adding and blending handsome generalized terrain
1:55 Pouring in a global water vector tile layer
2:20 Devious shading tricks using the esteemed Global Background rectangle layer
2:33 Adding a touchable tangible texture (here’s how I made that texture layer)
2:51 Time for a little spatial context, courtesy Human Geography basemap components
3:22 A table becomes point features and origin-destination spokes (more on that here)
3:52 How to handle geographic outliers in a map layout using insets
4:58 Hacking in some mass to enthingify map elements
5:20 Manually creating feature labels with text and rectangle graphics
5:57 Spring chickens
Enjoy! I hope you use some, or all, of these tricks in your upcoming map adventures. Maps are the language of geography. I’ve found that giving maps some texture and mass and fill them with a little more love and spirit and lived-in realism that make an audience think, even momentarily, that they can reach out and touch them, the message becomes personal. Maps invite a connection between reader and story, and there are so many opportunities to breathe a little bit of personality and joy into their mappiness.
Thanks for watching, friends! Happy enthingifying,
John