Poorly Designed Infographics

I found this site from a post in the forum of the MOOC class, Geospatial Revolution I am taking.

16 useless infographics . This gives you examples of poorly designed maps.  I have placed below the worst of the worst.

This map is 3 maps on top of each other. Sometimes you can overlay data, but not in this case. 

This map has four people representing roughly 43,000 nurses and then jumps by 28 more people for only a 3,000 increase in nurses!

This is showing when the Android is released. The long the color block the more usage? It does not explain much here. 

This map is showing two different thing one for child poverty and the other for schools needing improvement. It looks like the left is subcounties and the right is of counties. 

This could have been a interesting map if the slices corresponded with the amount of time people spend on the site. This makes it look like we all use each website for the same amount of time. 

Using Shift for Cartography

Problem: You want to slightly move your legend or another element in your map.

Solution: Hold the shift down while using the arrow keys to move your intended element.

I know this is a short and easy post today, but while using this trick today I thought some people might not know how to do this. This can save some headache when doing tedious work to your maps.

Smoothing Tool in Advanced Editor

Problem:
You have many polygons that are not smoothing and for aesthetics they need to be smoothed.

Solution:

1. Start an Edit session for the shapefile that needs to be smoothed. 
2. Select the individual polygon or multiple polygons that need to be smoothed.
   
3. Add the Advanced Editor toolbar.
4. Select the last icon, Smooth. 
   
5. A dialog box will appear and you will choose a positive number for the offset. This number will depend on the polygon. For this example I choose 1, but I have also done 10 to make the polygon smooth. 
   
6. Your final result should look smooth. If you select too high of an offset, this can drastically change the shape of your polygon. As you can see below the shape is still the same but the rough edges are gone.