Presenting a few random cartonotes from various digital maps I’ve been working on lately:
Indicate marine parks, preservation areas, and state beaches that extend into the water as transparent polygons with solid or dashed outlines. This allows the feature to be seen without giving the impression that it is solid land or some other solid feature.
When symbolizing road features it can be easiest to simply use a single color for all road types. This is simple but effective.
However, if you are interested in more complex road symbology using road casings and different colors for the different classes (e.g., highway, primary, secondary), then take care to make sure that bridges are separated and placed on top of the other road features.The feature order list will be something like this:
- highway bridges
- primary bridges
- secondary bridges
- highway, not bridges
- primary, not bridges
- secondary, not bridges
In other words, the bridges go above everything else that isn’t a bridge, even if the bridge is of type primary or secondary. You can see a secondary bridge (peach color) in the screenshot below that runs over a highway (purple color).
It is pretty typical to use the same hue with a slightly darker value for polygon outlines, as shown in the airport outline below. Hexcolortool is handy for lightening or darkening a color by a given percentage. Of course you can also adjust the value in the HSV color system or the lightness in HSL color system to achieve this.
Labels for features that are higher in order do not necessarily need to be darker in color. In the following example label hierarchy is achieved with larger state labels in a lighter color, while city labels are smaller but darker.
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