
Smart Mapping: Location (single symbol)
Visualize all of your features with one symbol
Sometimes you just need to map the location of things, whether it be airports, county boundaries, or highways. While mapping a single symbol may seem fairly basic, ask yourself: How can I make my symbols more meaningful? What ways can I make my symbols more intuitive?
When working with your data in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, choose the Styles option to work with smart mapping .
Smart mapping helps you create beautiful and informative maps, quickly. It is a capability, that by default, sets the cartography of your map based on the significant values within your data. If you choose a map attribute with only a geographic identifier, such as an airport name, highway number, or county name, the single symbol drawing style will be suggested as the default.
What is a Location (single symbol) map?
A location(single symbol) map is simply a map of locations, representing only one category. This drawing style can be for points, lines, and polygons.
Major Airports in the U.S.
A points map could be of airport locations. The example on the right shows a map of major airports in the U.S ., with an airplane symbol representing the point location of the airport.
Texas National Highway System
A map with line features might be of highways. The example on the right shows a map of Texas highways. The lines are colored in purple and contrast well against the dark basemap.
County and Tract Boundaries
A single symbol polygon map could be one of census boundaries. The example on the right shows county boundaries in a black, dashed stroke pattern, while the census tract boundaries are shown in with a blue outline.
Create a Location (single symbol) map
When creating a Location (single symbol) style map with smart mapping, there are a few options to vary the symbology: size, color, and transparency. You will see each of these options used in a point map example, but these options can also be applied to line and polygons symbology.
To get started, it's always a good idea to choose a basemap that gives an appropriate amount of detail, while also having neutral colors that allows your data to be the highlight on your map.
In this case, the Human Geography map from Living Atlas is selected that shows an adequate amount of geographic information, such as roads and geographic names, but its light gray colors allow for our data to be the main focus.
Note: If you do not see the Human Geography basemap available under your Basemaps pane, scroll down and click on the Living Atlas magnify glass, and search for 'Human Geography Map.'
1) With your layer of interest selected, first open the Styles pane on the right hand side.
For most drawing styles, you would need to choose an attribute. But since you are mapping only the location, you can leave this blank.
2) Click the Style options to explore the different options available to customize your symbology.
Clicking the Symbol style will expand the symbol style options: symbols, size, rotation, color, transparency.
The layer that we have selected is of Colleges and Universities . Smart mapping defaults the symbology to black circles, which are fine for seeing where each college or university is, but we can make the symbology more intuitive by switching the shape under Symbols.
Opening up the Symbols dropdown, we see a number of symbol categories for Classic Symbols and Vector Symbols.
Classic Symbols: All of the symbol sets except for the basic shapes are picture marker symbols which means they use an image to define the appearance of the marker. This means the size can be adjusted only with the Location (single symbol) style. Scaling these symbols can lead to distortion as the symbols become pixelated.
Vector Symbols: These symbols are scalable meaning the integrity of shapes is preserved in scaling which makes for cleaner symbols”, and better looking maps. Note: Vector symbols are only available for Map Viewer, and are unavailable in Map Viewer Classic.
Choose a symbol that is more intuitive to your layer. In this case, if we want to show where colleges and universities are, we can choose the graduation cap symbol under Vector Symbols > POI.
Enabling Adjust Size Automatically will allow our symbols to preserve their scale when zooming in/out. Choose a size that works well for the scale that you want to focus on.
Dragging the Rotation slider to the right will rotate your symbology clockwise. Likewise, dragging the Rotation slider to left will rotate your symbology counterclockwise.
This works well if you want to orient your symbology to a cardinal direction. For example, rotating the symbol 90° will orient the symbol to the east.
Customize your Fill Color in your symbology in order to personalize your map and make your symbols shine.
1) Under Colors, you can choose a preset of 16 available colors. These are great first choices, but we can customize our colors to get a color that we really like.
2) In the Custom Colors box, drag the bottom circle left or right to land on a specific color hue.
Dragging the top circle in different directions will create different color values and saturations.
3) If you have HEX codes, RGB, or HSV values you know you want to use, such as branding colors, you can quickly get the colors you want.
4) Save your colors that you like or want to use frequently by clicking the + sign. Click the - sign to remove any saved colors.
Transparency can be applied to your symbol fill to increase the transparency, or increase the opacity. This can be useful if your symbol is covering another detail on the map.
Similar symbol style options can be applied to the Outline of your symbology. One additional option is adjusting the Stroke Width.
Increasing the stroke width can make your symbol stand out more, which may be a positive thing. But increasing the stroke width too much might clutter your symbols and distract map viewers. Play around with settings and find the parameters that work best for you.
Many of these same style options can be applied when mapping lines and polygons. Although you cannot pick icons for lines nor polygons, setting the stroke and fill options can help make your line and polygon layers stand out better.
Single symbol layers work great in combination with other layers in a web map, as they can add supporting detail to the map.
Smart mapping makes mapping a single symbol easy and quick, while also allowing you to put your own personal touch into your symbols. Experiment with different shapes, symbols, colors, sizes, transparency, rotation and outlines to enhance the way your symbols appear.
Try it out today, and when ready share your maps with the hashtag #smartmapping and #ArcGISOnline.