Cartography Tips

Cartography Tips:

• For examples of good map design, look at the annual ESRI Map Book publications we have on the GIS shelves in Sutton Lab
• Remember to always use the Theme-Properties to rename your themes so that they are understandable to a normal human being. E.g., "Streets" instead of "cenline.shp".
• You should always include a title, legend, scale, north arrow, and cartographer/date information.
• It is good practice to include data source information
• You can hide any legends that you do now want to appear in the legend by choosing Theme-Hide Legend in the View window.
• A student last year found the Desaturate Legend script available on the ArcScripts web site (search for desaturate).  It is especially useful for toning down some of the colors in themes that are necessary background but which might otherwise overwhelm the map. For example, the standard land use colors in the ArcView legend file from the City of Austin are very bright (see normal map). By using the Desaturate Legend script, you can make these more pale, so that more important information (e.g., walkable buffer zones) would draw the viewer's attention (see desaturated map). To use this script,
  1. save it from the ESRI ArcScripts web site (or copy it from the Taniguchi GIS Data Server under the Utilities folder (in either case, the final file name should be desaturate.ave)
  2. Start ArcView, and add the theme(s) which you want to desaturate. If you have a legend set up for it that you like, make sure that you save this legend file (open the legend editor and click on the Save button to save the current layout as a new ArcView Legend file). If you want to desaturate an existing legend, load the existing legend file (e.g., Landuse-95.avl) by opening the legend editor and clicking on the Load button.
  3. In the Project menu, click on the Scripts icon (if necessary, scroll down - it is below the Views, Tables, etc. icons)
  4. Click on the New button
  5. Choose Script - Load Text File and navigate to find the desaturate.ave file. Click OK. This loads this script into your script box.
  6. Choose Script - Compile (or click on the checkmark icon) - the script is now ready for use.
  7. Click on your View to make it the active window and make sure that the theme you want to desaturate is the active theme
  8. Go back to the Script window again and make it the active window, and choose Script-Run (or click on the running person icon)
  9. Click Yes, when asked whether to desaturate with white
  10. Leave the desaturation amount set to 50% (you can experiment with this later) and click OK
  11. If you do not like the results, re-load the original ArcView legend file for the theme and try again with a different saturation percentage
  12. If you like the results, save them to a new ArcView legend file
• For information about using text labels and color/symbol palettes, see Tim's Tips for ArcView from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
• To create a good shaded relief map:
  1. With your DEM as the active theme, create a hillshade grid (choose Surface - Compute Hillshade)
  2. Double-click on the DEM's legend to bring up the legend editor
  3. In the legend editor, click on the Advanced button and choose the Hillshaded grid as the brightness theme. Experiment with the cell brightness numbers to test the results.
  4. Also experiment with your number of classes in the legend, and with the shades. Make sure your legend type is set to Graduated Color. If you set the first and last colors, you can use the Color Ramp icon () to ramp the colors between the beginning and end colors.  See the sample hillshade map of the Austin region, and then look at the legend editor settings used to create this map.
  5. For more detailed information, see New Color System Enhances Relief Maps, ArcUser Magazine (January-March 2001 issue). This article discusses the new ShadeMax color system that Nat recommended in class. The easiest way to find the ShadeMax download on ESRI's ArcScripts web site is to do a search for shademax.
• For information and examples of using MapPublisher with ArcView files, see Nat Brown's web site: http://mather.ar.utexas.edu/students/cadlab/nat_gis_web/project/projectIndex.html

05 November 2001
The School of Architecture at UT Austin
Comments to: Barbara Parmenter