Cartographer's Toolkit

I was thinking today that I needed a new method of sending quick maps to clients. As I’m going about a project I’ll be discussing certain bits with clients and colleagues and inevitably it seems like it would be easier if they could simply look at my data. The best thing to do in this situation is to use screen-sharing but many of my conversations are via email while we discuss things in between meetings (well, okay, while they are in meetings – I usually sit on my rear all day actually working

So the logical thing to do, and that which I have always done, is to make a quick layout in ArcMap, stick the legend on there and export it to attach to an email. This bothers me because the maps are terrible looking given their draft form, and they take too long to make. When something takes a while and is terrible looking it seems like there must be a better way.

Today I thought of it. It seems obvious now, but why not simply send a screenshot to the client or colleague? That way you don’t have to fool with a legend in layout view because the table of contents is right there. The other great positive about this is that it is automatically known to be a draft, in-progress work due to the fact that they are looking at a screenshot. I don’t have to caveat the bad-looking map as a “rough map” or a “very draft map.” This way the recipient of the thing can focus on the question being asked instead of the presentation of the data.

Today I did this twice. Once for a map of an area near Bremerton, WA showing a proposed regulatory area and the old zoning:

And the other time for some quick examples of what some data looked like after I converted it from a table of lat/longs:


So that’s it. I think from now on all my quick-maps will be screenshots.