Vintage Layer Styling for ArcGIS

30 Day Map Challange — Day 7

Old maps have a very distinct style. As an exploration into layer stying in ArcGIS I have attempted to re-create and old 1840’s style map styling layer. This stying layer has been applied to a map of the UK, and a small section of the town of Kendal, in Cumbria in has been chosen for the subject of this map.

An OS sourced layer of ‘local’ and ‘important’ buildings has been added, and the important buildings have been labelled to add some context.

The font “Constantia” was chosen and a letter spacing of 420% and a letter width of 150% on the river Kent to allow it to be streched across the length of the page. The font for the name of the town is “Bad Guy Black”. The map background has been set to an ‘off-white’ colour to give it a vintage tint.

The decision to make the river blue was to help it stand out against the many bridges across the river in Kendal. The vector based stylings are a hatched fill instead of a solid colour. Many of the roads are made up of two lines, one that is (for example) 7 points wide and black, and another line on top of it that is 5 points wide, set to the off-white colour. This makes the roads look like they have width. The roads have been classified into different symbology according to their type (A Road, B Road, Minor Road, etc) to allow different symbologies and widths to be chosen.