One Minute Map Hacks: 46-50

Hacks 1-5
Hacks 6-10
Hacks 11-15
Hacks 16-20
Hacks 21-25
Hacks 26-30
Hacks 31-35
Hacks 36-40
Hacks 41-45

Well…it’s come to this. Fifty one-minute hacks have been conjured. Fifty. That’s nearly half of a hundred. Easily a couple dozen. Traditionally this is the gold anniversary, so here are five solid gold tips to save you time, give you pause, ignite some gumption, and inspire some ideas…

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So you made a masterpiece of stacked up subtle shading and lighting and other terrain elements but now you have a million precarious layers. How can you just flatten them into a single georeferenced image graphic for easy sharing and using in other projects? Export your stack of goodness as a spatially sentient GeoTIFF. Here’s how.

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Here’s how to make one of those crazy, decorative, highly thematic, for-funzies, picture fill maps for some reason.

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Here’s a quick way to get those charming tapered cross-hatching lines (AKA Leonardo Lines…just made that up) that are common on maps of the 16, 17, and 1800s. And you don’t have to wrestle with hacking buffers…that don’t scale. This is a visual effect so it stays nice when you zoom in or out. Only watch the first minute of this video though please.

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Do you ever drop a raster image into ArcGIS Pro and are surprised by how it looks? Darker and higher contrast? That’s because some rendering overrides are applied by default. Here’s how to un-do that.

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You are making a map about fuzzy/historic/unofficial/uncertain/general places. But your data is all overly-confident polygons. Here’s how to brew some uncertainty into those areas, with ArcGIS Pro.

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Well thank you for whiling away five more minutes of your allotted time on this earth with these perhaps-helpful, possibly-useful, arguably-time-efficient, one minute map hacks. Our conscious is just one long progression through this shared experience of life, punctuated, and perceptually-extended, by memorable blips along the way. Maybe one or two of these hacks can serve you as a referential blip in your ongoing geographic adventures, making your way a bit clearer or opening up some new opportunity for creation. Or maybe they just make you smile a little? Thank you for your time.

Love, John

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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