Glassy North Arrows for ArcGIS Pro

Here is an ArcGIS Pro style containing four north arrows.

They have a glassy semitransparent white appearance with a shadow effect for better visibility over highly textured surfaces while muted enough to provide balance. They provide a visual reference for north that doesn’t fully obscure or otherwise steal visibility from underlying map imagery.

Plus they’re a bit of fun sizzle.

Will they look good over your map? Maybe! I wouldn’t try them over a solid basemap, though; that will look pretty poor probably. They’re intended for the busy high contrast varied hues of an imagery basemap. Or if you want it to look like a spaceship of pandimensional hyperintelligent beings landed on your map. But of course you will do what you feel is right, which may include not using them for any map.

Happy Northing! John

P.S. New to styles? Get ready to live! After you download the GlassyNorthArrows.stylx style file, go to your ArcGIS Pro project’s Catalog, navigate to Styles, then right-click and choose to add a style. Then just point to the style file. Now when you insert a north arrow in to a layout, you will see these glassy north arrow options.

About the author

John Nelson

I have far too much fun looking for ways to understand and present data visually, hopefully driving product strategy and engaging users. I work in the ArcGIS Living Atlas team at Esri, pushing and pulling data in all sorts of absurd ways and then sharing the process. I also design user experiences for maps and apps. When I'm not doing those things, I'm chasing around toddlers and wrangling chickens, and generally getting into other ad-hoc adventures. Life is good. You might also like these Styles for ArcGIS Pro: esriurl.com/nelsonstyles

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