topic Re: Creating reference map from scratch versus out of the box in Cartography and Maps Questions

Creating reference map from scratch versus out of the box

VogtBoat — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:56:52 GMT

Hello, I am a county GIS technician that is making a series of large and small scale reference map for my county sheriffs department. As you know making a reference map from scratch that is legible is difficult.

Are there any out of the box label groups and symbology groups online that can help me produce a boiler plate map fairly quickly with our internal data? I find this symbology provided with Archie Pro to okay but I not quite up to the standard I am looking for.

I am trying not to spend the rest of my life adjusting drawing order and street and roads symbologies and making fine-tune adjustments to labels.

I am in the United States, and I have very common things that need to be mapped like state, land, state forest, interstates, state, highways, major roads, minor roads, campgrounds, small towns, large towns, etc. Surely there’s a cartographer out there smarter than I that has their symbology and labels dialed in and has shared it.

Re: Creating reference map from scratch versus out of the box

SteveCole — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:57:32 GMT

You might try browsing ESRI's Solutions Gallery to see if there's something in there that you can use as a starting point. I don't think any of it will have labels but there should be map templates. Also, NAPSIG has some resources as well for symbology and perhaps map templates but their perspective is from the Emergency Management side of things.

Re: Creating reference map from scratch versus out of the box

DEAF_PROBERT_68 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:06:24 GMT

I know it is kind of late to post but in the past ESRI always has their UC Map Gallery books... They have that now online https://mapgallery.esri.com/