Customizing Your Legend in ArcMap
by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 13, 2010 • cartography esri • COMMENTHere’s a new tip for ArcMap I didn’t know about – the ESRI Mapping Center provides a detailed tutorial on customizing your legend patch shapes: Mapping Center : New Legend Patch Shapes.
What am I even talking about? It’s the ability to turn your plain ol’ legend into something spiffy like this:
The shapes shown in the new legend are a smaller representation of an urban area or lake actually shown on the map. The process is not as automated as I’d like, as there are quite a few steps involved.
If the above tutorial is too much work, you can also choose a pre-defined patch shape rather than the dull rectangle.
Yet another alternative is to, you know, just export to Illustrator. Isn’t that what all cartographers do anyway?
