Crafting your own basemap styles with Flex or Silverlight

By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead, for Ismael Chivite, ArcGIS Server product management team

When building web mapping applications, choosing the right basemap is not always an easy task. I always look for basemaps that will make my data stand out. I do not want the basemap to be a distraction. I also ask that the basemaps provide good context: maps with rich background information, generally in the form of roads, place names etc.

While ArcGIS Online provides you with quite a variety of basemaps, in this post we are going to explore a handy technique for giving a final touch to those basemaps. A technique that may actually achieve the balance you were looking for, without requiring you to make any new maps from scratch. Using logic available in Flex and Silverlight, we will apply a client-side color remapping to the map tiles. This makes it possible to apply a great number of styles to existing basemaps without creating new tile caches.

Read the full blog entry on the ArcGIS Server blog.

About the author

Aileen Buckley

Dr. Aileen Buckley has been making maps since she was an undergraduate student. She has a Bachelors in Geography and Spanish from Valparaiso University, a Masters in Geography from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in Geography from Oregon State University. She is a senior product engineer on the Living Atlas team, and her work focuses on determining and sharing best practices for mapping and analysis with modern GIS. She publishes and presents world-wide on many aspects of mapping and GIS. She is a co-author of Map Use: Reading, Analysis, Interpretation, and she is a co-editor for the Atlas of Oregon. Aileen is a former president of CaGIS (the U.S. cartographic association) and is actively involved with the International Cartographic Association in which she is the lead delegate for the United States.

Connect: