How to Make Cool-Looking Callouts with Map Graphics

hello thank you so much for joining me let's say you're making a map and you want to i don't know like call out various features in your map and you just want to draw a little graphic saying this is what i'm talking about and you don't want to deal with creating a new geographic layer or anything so here's an example let's say i'm making a map of insanely beautiful lakes and here is bear lake in utah a gorgeous place saw it for the first time when i was like 13 or something and it blew my mind how just beautiful it was i was on a trip a road trip with my my dad and grandma it was really cool okay anyways enough about enough about that let's talk about how to draw little call outs on your map this is a good case for a graphics layer so a graphics layer i'll add a graphics layer to my map which creates a new tab category here called graphics layer uh map graphics and i can insert all kinds of graphics you know you could do like a block of text you can do a polygon where the text wraps inside that polygon just a straight shot text curve all kinds of cool things an image you can drop an image onto your map and it'll pin it geographically all of these things will have some geographic awareness they're not full on gis layers they're a graphical add-on layer that you've tacked onto your map which has a lot of use cases let's be honest doesn't always have to be a full-on label layer or a feature layer sometimes you just want to draw a little basic graphics if you just have a handful of things to call out on your map i'll show you how to do this so uh in this case i'll i'll just draw a circle you can do an ellipse too which is just a squished circle and i'll drag a circle rotated from the center which surprised me that's cool so here's my my graphic it's a circle graphic i've added it to my to my map now check this out if i zoom in pan it stays put it's a little bit like i've drawn a circle in a gis layer and saved it but i didn't have to go through all that work and dealing with projections and stuff it's just a circle pinned to a certain location on my map it's well within the good enough realm of cartography which is frankly where i live okay so we've got this circle how do we make it look cool well there's a lot of ways to make it look cool by default it's just got this black stroke in it what turns out to be a transparent fill i'll right click the shape itself and go into this properties and if i go to the symbol tab i can see what layers are available here it's just got that black solid stroke and a solid fill that happens to be transparent i'll just turn that off because i don't need that right now um let's let's make this like a cool kind of um shaded area of interest overlay like a magnifying glass kind of effect shall we so let's dig in instead of a solid stroke i'll choose a gradient stroke now i'm using arcgis pro 2.7 graphic layers were introduced in 2.6 so you have to be using 2.6 or earlier to be able to do this i'll make my gradient stroke bonkers big um let's make it 20 and i'll hit apply okay we're getting somewhere now see the thick gradient stroke is rendering on either side of my circle what i wanted to do is draw start drawing at the edge of my circle kind of make a shadow effect so all i have to do is just give an offset effect of half of my line's width so it's 20 points thick so i'm going to make it 10 points offset see what that did that just grew out my circle graphic 10 points now my circle graphic is drawing outside of this area of interest it's just a way to control precision i like that kind of thing now i mean it doesn't look very shady does it i mean we can go from black to a transparent black i'll hit okay and hit apply that looks like a cool shadow isn't that nice now again i can i'll unselect it and i'll just zoom out give you an indication of what it looks like it uh that 20 pixels is relative to my perspective so as i zoom out it's still going to be 20 well 20 points wide so you'll see it at all scales as you zoom in it just keeps showing you 20 points 20 points okay select it again that's neat that's like level one kind of neat let's do level two kind of neat right because you've paid good money to watch this video and i want to give you your value so here is the stroke let's make it just bananas we'll do 100 can we go that far dare we yeah why not so half of its thickness as an offset it'll fly right now i've got a very clear call out saying hey look at bear lake check this out and it looks handsome it doesn't have to be a circle it can be a lips or a square a polygon whatever you want to do now as i'm looking at this i think this is neat it's a linear gradient which means it starts from one color stop and it transitions to another color stop it's just a simple linear gradient fully opaque black to fully transparent black i can push and pull this and nudge it and i'm definitely gonna do that here's how you can do that you aren't stuck with just these two stops you know start and finish i can expand this and go into its color scheme properties and dig deeper now what i like to do with um shadow like gradient effects like this is i don't love linear i want it to taper off a bit be stronger here and then kind of fade out that's how real world shadows work anyway so here's a quick way that i do that i'll add a color which drops it by default it you know halfway between these two color stops and then i'll just snug it in a little bit closer to the origin and then i'll do it that again click here snug it in a little bit closer to the origin so watch here when i hit apply it's linear gradient here and i'm giving it more of a tapered gradient really minor but you know what this is where i live really minor gradient tweaking call me crazy okay that's interesting now we're looking at an area that has a relatively dark background it might not be as obvious as i want so what graphic designers frequently do in this sort of scenario is they'll they'll apply what's called a double stroke a double stroke just means two outlines of a contrasting color so that if i'm looking at a light background this dark stroke is apparent if i'm looking at a dark background they'll use a light stroke so that no matter what your context is you've got a light and a dark that's called double stroke and it's helpful in cartography for sure so let's go back into the symbol go to my layers and now i'm going to dig into the structure and i'm just going to get rid of that fill because i'm not using it and i don't i don't need it and then i'll add a simple stroke layer this one is not a gradient it's just a simple stroke layer and i'll make it white which contrasts this black shadow effect and i'll hit apply now i've double stroked this area of interest graphic dark and light so no matter the context i'm able to visually discern this call out the more fastidious among us in the gis world will chafe at the fact that i'm actually covering up some of my map here i'm okay with that but some people might think that bothers me i'm not able to see data and i want to see all the data for whatever your use case so i'm going to give you a level what what are we at like level three coolness we're like at level three nerdiness so i'll choose this in arcgis pro 2.7 which is a recent release i'm in december of 2020 right now maybe it's not recent when you watch this but whatever arcgis 2.7 now supports something called blend modes oh my goodness blend modes are amazing i love them i love them i'm in love with them blend modes are so cool so this is a graphic that's rendering on top of my base map image i'm covering up some of that with this graphic selected i can go up into the graphic layers appearance and check it out blend modes this is interesting normal just means you know like as if there weren't a blend mode technically normal is a blend mode it just renders on top of whatever is below it i'm going to choose something called soft light boom okay now i am i'm literally not occluding any map content anymore it's just boosting the brightness of the underlying imagery by that one pixel stroke isn't that cool now this is just a really handsome way to create a call out manually on your map if you have a handful of things that you want to add to a map where a graphics layer is a good solution for you and i'll remind you that as i zoom and pan it stays put it knows where it lives geographically and that's the hallmark of a graphics layer in our js pro a really helpful little dude level three wait level four nerdiness okay let's move this to another part of the world where my imagery back here is a little bit dark how how does this look over a brighter context so i'm going to i'm going to just drag this to another part of the world make it bigger so i can grab it easier it's kind of cool when i'm moving or resizing a graphics layer that has a blend mode applied to it it just shows me the actual graphics layer and when i let go it applies that blend mode isn't that fun it's fun for me so i'll drag this over to the sahara and i'm going to look for the recha structure if you don't know what the reshot structure re-shot reach out i'm not sure it's this really fascinating geologic phenomenon in the sahara it's called eye of the sahara sometimes it's this ringed formation and a lot of people thought it was an impact crater impact formation turns out it's probably not an impact crater it's probably a geologic layer of rocks that domed up underground and then when it was exposed to the surface it was weathered away to reveal these concentric rings of harder i don't know what it is basalts or granites and then the softer layers wore away so you get this just beautiful ridged feature in a circular cool huh anyways for this view of my map maybe this is my area of interest and i want to visually call it out so i've got my graphic here like this and i'll i'll be honest it's a little bit confusing because my feature of interest is circular and the fact that my callout is circular could lead to misinterpretations of this map right well do i have to start all over if i want to make a square thing and i want to apply this styling that i've done no way this is one of the many many unspeakable pleasures that styles provide us so if i right click this feature there's an option to save it to a style and saving it to style means it'll remember all of the symbology layers and things that i've done here and make that available for other features even map features so i'll save it to a style and by default i'll just leave it in my favorites and i'll call it um call out area of interest fade i don't know i'm gonna delete i'm gonna delete it after this video anyway so it doesn't matter what i call it hit okay okay now get this uh graphic out of the way and i'll go back into the graphics area and this time i'll choose a square because i don't want a circular callout to impact the visual interpretation of a circular feature i'm just trying to avoid confusion so i'll do this by default it's just that black outline boring so with it selected up here in the map graphics area you'll see this symbol section inside the ribbon menu expand this out all the way and wait i mean you have to dig to get to it but way down here are the styles in my favorites that i've just saved so here it is here's call out area of interest fade if i click this pow it even remembered that i had a blend mode applied isn't that cool see if i go like this you can see the normal so where are we like level five nerdiness for using graphics layers and styling them up and saving them to styles and get rid of this spotlight effect ooh spotlight would have been a cool thing to call it i'll call it i'll delete that so there you go this is how to use graphics layers in arcgis pro available in 2.6 or later it includes text by the way give that a look how to give it a cool visual effect using symbology and how to save that symbology as a style so you can reuse it to other graphic elements that you draw on your map happy graphic good luck out there

Channel: John Nelson

Views: 5,148

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: cartography, map making, mapping, map, geography, gis, how to, tutorial, lesson, demo, demonstration, tech, esri, arcgis, arc gis, arcgis pro

Id: LIrmivtEnFs

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 22 2020