Shapeburst - Go you good thing - QGIS Brighton

I've recently downloaded the latest QGIS 2.6.1 Brighton (although I think there might be another due out tomorrow) I've been neglecting my GIS for a while now, the first two years of a small persons life has a tendency to suck the hours from your day light hours. After installing Brighton on my Samsung Homesync lite (lovingly donated to me by my mum) I managed to score a great NZ coast layer from Koordinates (as usual)

Its no secret I like good looking maps.. I've been a GIS analyst for too long and although the spreadsheets and tables and calculations will inevitably give me the sources of data I need, my heart is in the GIS apps cartographic functionality. I like good looking maps, I have in my previous job felt like I was screaming at the top of my lungs in a crowded room and no one even raises an eyebrow.

No matter how many hours/days/weeks you've spent sifting preparing your data/numbers/reports, no one will gain the benefits of it if they are not coerced into looking at your map for more than the 3-5 seconds it takes for the brain to assess if they want to.

This is a much longer conversation that I'll leave for another day, the short story is Brighton has a cool cartographic function called Shapeburst gradient as well as being able to set a layer style as "inverted"

I used one coastal polygon layer to apply style to both the land and the ocean in the following example by duplicating it in the table of contents and using it two ways. Youtube tute here



Here is the settings I used for the land, the water was very similar but instead of "single symbol" I chose "inverted polygons"


Well, hopefully this is the start of my getting a bit of my mapping mojo back. I cannot promise I'll post any more frequently, but I hope this post will let you know that I'm still here and among the craziness that is life, cool maps still float my boat.


Rock on
Melissa

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