A Complete Guide to Graduated Color Renderers in ArcGIS Pro
Eric Pimpler
Few symbology tools get more use in day-to-day GIS work than the graduated colors renderer. Whether you’re mapping median household income by census tract, crime rates by precinct, or population change by county, graduated colors are the workhorse behind the classic thematic (choropleth) map. But the renderer is deceptively simple on the surface. The choices you make — which field to map, whether to normalize it, how many classes to create, and above all which classification method to use — can produce wildly different maps from the exact same data.
This article walks through the options available when defining a graduated colors renderer in ArcGIS Pro, with a special focus on the classification methods that determine where your class breaks fall.