Mixing serif and sans-serif fonts should be avoided - the exception being if one type of font is being used to exclusively label a prominentĪ comparison of old (left) and new (right) topographic maps produced by swisstopo. Line breaks within labels should be avoided whenever possible. Water features such as lakes, rivers, and oceans look very nice when labelled by italic fonts. The simple maps below illustrate the subtle differences using different colour halos can make. Using halos with colours that contrast with the background can be used to help make the text stand out, which is particularly useful when putting text labels on imagery. They should be the same colour as the background in order to give the illusion that the text has space around it. When creating maps using vector data the halos shouldn’t stand out, This can be accomplished in ArcMap by adding a halo, or mask in the text symbol editor. a city label appearing over top of roads) ensure that the label hasĮnough ( (visual_arts)) surrounding it so that it is legible.
#Arcmap symbology professional
Produced for a professional organization will look very different if you use comic sans, compared to a more suitable font (i.e. The type of, well, type you choose to label your map can affect its look and feel as much as the symbology and colour choices.
Terrain tileset by Stamen to provide a subtle masking effect.
Pure black is very overpowering, and rarely exists in nature. Elements at the top of the heirarchy that you would like to pop out to the viewersĬan be symbolized with more saturated colours. Colours that are softer on the eyes can be made a combination of playing with theīrightness (or Value), or decreasing the saturation. To the HSV colour space in the ArcMap color selector. This can be easily accomplished by switching
Some of the basic guidelines I follow are:Ĭhoose pastel-like, desaturated colours for features that aren’t at the top of the Many of these points are applicable to bothĪrcGIS, QGIS, and web mapping, although the primary audience for this post is going to be Esri users.Ĭhoosing a pleasing and consistent colour scheme becomes harder and harder the more features and layers you add to your map (without it looking What I’m going to present areĪ few tips and tricks I use every day that will help your maps look awesome. Who has learned a thing or two on my quest to create good looking products for my job. In many of the tiles often make exporting a professional looking map for print a difficult endeavor.įirst, as a disclaimer: I would not consider myself a professional cartographer or designer. Furthermore, the compression artifacts present When adding your own data on top of these basemaps.
#Arcmap symbology free
Organizations like Google,ĬartoDB, and of course Esri are providing free and gorgeousīasemap tiles that can be used in the browser, as well as inside of desktop GIS applications.Ī concequence of using these tiles is that you will usually not be able to perfectly replicate their look and feel Web GIS today is growing at an exponential pace.