Best Practices for Organizing Cluttered Features and Labels on The Map

In a hurry to produce your maps and sharing with everyone, you may receive like these comments from readers: "I can't read the map, features are not clear", "Why you are turning off labels in this area! however you turned it on..", "Labels are overlapped, can you enhance it on adobe illustrator?". All these similar comments may be solved using Label Placement, Priorities, and Weights options.

Below is a sample of how before and after using the above-mentioned options and the best practice on how to use them. In some cases, when you are preparing a map with tens or may hundreds of layers which cause cluttered labels and features on the map plus if your labels contain customized labeling classes I know it may time consuming and difficult to distinguish layers in-crowd, but let's going to some good practice.

The default labeling engine in ArcGIS Pro is Maplex Labeling Engine        

Firstly you should start by preparing a list of layers that will have labels on the map, then ranking the orders of these layers according to their importance in case of many overlapping features from different layers, which layers do you need to display their labels? and as some scenarios, you need to prevent labels from overlapping certain features on the maps so you will come to the second step which is giving weights for layers which their features are important, Finally, you will go for the label placement options to set the best location according to each layer type.

• First Step, start by ordering the layers with a higher priority to place it above labels with a lower priority and if you have a lot of classes per each layer you can arrange labels based on classes, When you are working with tens of layers or classes per the map you can organize layers in groups so it will be easier to arrange them:

• The second step is to give weights for features which you need to prevent labeling from overlapping these features, by default the value is set to zero and the maximum feature weight is 1,000. Giving 1,000 value means there is no space for labeling at this location so in this case if you do good placement options the labels will try to fit in another place but if not it will be not displayed or it will be overlapped on another feature, so for the best practice you should go for the third step to prevent these labels from overlapping or to be unplaced on the map:

The last step is about to choose label placement, and you will find different predefined placements available in Maplex to choose but for the best results don't leave it with default, in my example above I choose Best Position Placement and set preference with different ranks for each point layer to be the opposite of other layers placement so you will see always that Metro Stations labels and Tram Stations Labels are in different sides of features to give the best arrangement for labeling positions:

More options can improve labeling on the map with fewer efforts before exporting your labels to annotations or before taking your map to illustrator to place them manually one by one, as you see in the above example how the colors of the label have been classified based on roads type labels size has been reduced automatically according to zoom level, moreover that the automatic spacing of letters and words to be within a specific distance from lines, for more options you can read from Esri documentation about labeling:

Text on a map—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Prioritize labels—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Weight labels and features—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

This map has been produced using ArcGIS Pro 2.9 and Data source using feature layers from ArcGIS Online.