Creating Fill Symbols with Feeling - ESRI Mapping Center

New post on the Mapping Center that I thought you might be interested in. It's all about creating fill symbols that are interesting and better depict the real data. ------------------ Depicting natural areas such as vegetation or complex hydrography such as swamps and estuaries can be accomplished by merely using solid green fill and blue fill symbols. However, such symbols are arguably bland, and certainly do not convey relative density, ruggedness, or texture Marker fill symbols can create many effects, ranging from replacing many of the old bitmap patterns on topographic maps to very modern styles of symbology. For example, click on the image to see a more detailed PDF of this map and notice the trees (green random dot fills) have two densities, depicting heavily wooded areas versus scattered trees. The yellow polygon with green dots represent agricultural fields on this map. In both cases on this map, using random dot fills provides more flexibility in using those shades of green and yellow. By varying the color, density, and size of dots, we can create easily distinguishable variation in our symbols, allowing many different classes of vegetation to be shown, while letting the background color represent major types of vegetation To seed your exploration of working with random fills, download the RandomFill.style file that we put together. Several different approaches to random fill symbols are contained within the style. The easiest way to build a marker fill symbol is to... Read More...