Cartography Guide

During my time as a Dangermond Fellow at National Audubon Society, I saw a need for more cartographic support for the Audubon Network. Although Audubon has brand guidelines and many excellent resources and templates for websites, flyers, powerpoints, there was no guidance or resources for map products. Since visual identity is an important element of Audubon’s work, I wanted to create some resources to help make it easy for folks to integrate the Audubon colors, fonts, logos, and general design styles into their maps and apps.

I created a Cartography Guide to help Audubon GIS users create high-quality maps that mesh with the brand guidelines. The guide is intended to provide both basic cartography guidance as well as tools and resources specific to Audubon users.

I led this project with support from the rest of the Enterprise GIS team and in collaboration with the Design team. I also interviewed many GIS users throughout the Audubon network and their input was invaluable in creating a usable product.

I created the guide in ArcGIS Hub and used custom html/css to achieve the formatting.

As part of this project, I created a suite of style resources for Audubon users, including:

• An ArcGIS Pro Style with Audubon colors, color palettes, symbols, and text elements

• A Web Style with vector points, lines, and polygons for use in ArcGIS Online

• Multiple StoryMap themes

• Multiple custom vector tile basemaps

• An Experience Builder template

• Example maps to demonstrate cartography principles and design ideas

I gave a presentation about the cartography guide at the 2024 NACIS conference, which you can watch here!