Sure, we can make features look like they are glowing. But how can we make them look like they are casting light on the basemap below? Here’s a silly little trick using crafty symbology and blend modes in ArcGIS Pro. In this case we’ll use glorious stork migration paths, from Movebank. The Gist: Here’s a three-minute … Continue reading How to Make Features Illuminate an Underlying Basemap
Here are some StoryMap stories that I’ve written over the years… College Football Playoff Recruiting Footprints Piracy & Time Travel How Deep is Challenger Deep? Julie’s Improbable Flight How to Write a Story, starring sharks and hurricanes Enclaves & Exclaves Geographic Misconceptions Bruised Borders The Bright Life of the Only Female Medal of Honor Recipient … Continue reading Stories
Blend modes can be a complex thing to wrap one’s head around. Experimentation is the best teacher, but even then there are lots of variabilities involved, depending on the layer you use to experiment. The Blend Mode Helper Map (and its constituent Blend Mode Helper layer) reduces that complexity by providing a reference graphic of colors and tones … Continue reading Blend Mode Helper
I’ve been to Columbia Glacier, just west of Valdez, Alaska, three times. The first was as a youngster in 1984, the second in 1987, and the final time in 2000. Each time, the ride by boat to the terminal edge of the ice where it calves into Prince William Sound, took a bit longer. I’ve … Continue reading How to make this map of a melting glacier
Ah the simple pleasures of the World Imagery basemap. So much earth. So much imagery. So many corners of this world to explore. How can we take something so verdant and charming and just ratchet it up to eleven? We’ll use a water mask and some layer effects, that’s how! 0:00 Start out with the … Continue reading How to emboss an imagery basemap
I often struggle to find high resolution polygons for things that tend to change, like water, urban, ice, whatever. Here’s how you can wrangle some up-to-date, detailed, water polygons for your small or medium scale maps (plus five different ways you can style them up)… Here’s the gist… 0:00 Large scale vs small scale0:42 Sentinel-2 Land … Continue reading How to find (and style!) detailed water polygons for your map
I once heard someone say that standard hillshade (one-direction light source) ignores half of the terrain. While this is an exaggeration, it makes a good point. Earth has an atmosphere and light diffuses, bounces, and wraps around a terrain in a manner that a single light direction misses. What’s more, the hues of light behave … Continue reading Throwing Shade In Wild Color
Cartographers will often exaggerate the natural scale of a mapped feature to help it communicate something of its nature. Some examples are vertical exaggeration of terrain or the very existence of point symbols (cities aren’t actually that big). We embellish for effect. Making a river a bit wider at its mouth, where it meets the … Continue reading How to make tapered rivers in ArcGIS Pro
ArcGIS Pro is a serious tool for serious GIS analysis. Are you ready for some seriously charming illustration style cartography? Ok! . . Children’s maps are a valuable thing. They are often the first impressions the world of geography has on every single one of us. What an opportunity! These maps use a handful of tricks and … Continue reading Storybook Cartography
