I've been reading John Nelson's blog posts on Imhof style cartography. John Nelson is an ESRI cartographer who has made many nice contributions to using Arc styles, in particular, some very appealing "antique" or otherwise unexpected styles. Imhof style cartography combines a number of effects, such as an altitude palette that ranges from transparent in higher elevations to a shade of green in lower elevations. When used as a layer above hill-shaded relief, such a layer allows higher elevations to show through the transparency while increasing amounts of green "haze" reduce detail lower. I've been playing around with this stuff in 9, primarily to get some look-ahead on what people might expect from 9 in terms of styles and other effects. For example, Nelson talks about use of multidirectional hill shading. That's not in 9 yet, but it will be. Likewise, there is a lot of appeal to the idea of being able to import into 9 or otherwise consume .style and stylx files created for ESRI products. Why go to the effort of re-loading and duplicating all those colors, symbology, etc., when you could just load them with a point and a click, right? :-) But it turns out that if one is willing to spend a bit of tinker time at it (Nelson had to do that with Arc, too), you can get some very interesting presentations with 9 just as it is today, without even doing the "full Imhof" thing. There is a new example on the Gallery page for that. What's interesting is how radically you can change the "look" of the thing by manipulating opacity settings in the Layers panel, adjusting colors slightly in the palettes used, and so on. The direct link to the big image is http://www.manifold.net/images/antique_swiss_look.png The direct link to the PDF mentioned (A4 paper size) is http://www.manifold.net/files/antique_swiss_look.pdf
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