Visual Strategies for Overlapping Polygons

[@husiyuan930517]

The last two tricks are sooooo good and useful. Thanks so much for sharing!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Great, thanks!

[@danwdoo]

Simple, immensely useful, and entertaining as always. Brilliant work as always!

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks Danny!

[@ZorkoZerg]

Feature blending is something I didn't have an opportunity to use yet but I am a big fan of tessellations. Another great video full of useful techniques. Thank you John.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks Zorko!

[@mlsauron]

I'm so glad I've found this channel! Cheers mr. John‼

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Wonderful, thank you!

[@bertkraan2817]

Great work! Thanks John.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks!

[@outkast_monke]

What about overlapping from two different layers

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

that's harder. you could use a spatial join and aggregate the data of one into the other. you could also do a union of the two layers and make discrete unique shapes. and probably other things. but it's not a straightforward.

[@austinyu797]

Wow I feel like these videos always come right when I need them! I had recently made a similar map displaying wildfires with messy overlap, but the requester wanted them classified into 4 classes by years. Not sure if you had any thoughts of how to properly symbolize that and maintain distinction; what I ended up doing was using the overlay layer blend coupled a white outline.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

I think in that case I’d use the hexagon aggregation method

[@ava.artemis]

This is super helpful. Thank you for sharing. 🙏🙏🙏

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks @@ava.artemis!

[@crimsonstone369]

Take a week just learning the basics and you will be good, I been using soft soft since it was Fruity Loops back in 03, and still learn

[@miqal95]

You can also make hatching at a different angle. For example 45° for yellow polygon and -45° for blue one.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Yes! Lots of fun options

[@annissu911]

What if you have more than two overlapping polygons, each with it's distinct color ?

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

in that case, three classes makes this technique a lot messier and i wouldn't recommend it. unless you used cyan, magenta, and yellow, and used a multiply blend mode to combine their hues like a printer does, maybe?

[@JV-gi1hs]

Thanks John. But when I make legends out of those blended features, they won't display them in the layout.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

yes, unfortunately legends aren't able to show the relationship that blend modes have on stacks of layers.

[@michaelblinn3761]

Do you have strategies for lableing overlapping polygons? I would like it if I could push the label to the area of the polygon that was still showing instead stead of having stacked labels.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

that can definitely be a challenge. let me think about this one.

[@connor3089]

Super useful visual strategies. Thanks for such a great video! For CA fires, based on this video and your blog from a few years ago, I cannot, for the life of me, get the spatial join to do a join_count of # fires within each hexagon >1. I did see your correction of join within in the blog, also tried it as intersect as in the video and can't get it to work.

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

I’m away from my computer this week Vance but send me an email and we’ll figure it out next week

[@gdurkee]

@@JohnNelsonMaps Heya: could you publish the solution if/when you do it? I was also struggling with a similar workflow. Grazie!

[@senaretothman4757]

Nice

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

Thanks!

[@gistutorial593]

thank you

[@JohnNelsonMaps]

You bet!