How to Easily Create Legends With Unique Values Symbology
After spending hours perfecting your map or model—adjusting colors, refining details, and making sure it tells a clear story—the last thing you want is for the legend to throw off the entire presentation. But sometimes, that’s exactly what happens, particularly when you’re working with unique values symbology. You add a legend, only to end up with something that’s clunky, misaligned, or overflowing with unnecessary details. Suddenly, your polished visualization looks incomplete, and instead of hitting “export,” you’re stuck fiddling with legend settings that never seem to cooperate.
We get it: a great map needs a great legend to provide essential context. But it shouldn’t take another hour of your time to make it look right. And yet, if you’re in geoscience, you may have found yourself in this situation. The good news? We’ve spent months revising legends with unique values symbology to ensure you get what you want the first time—without any headaches!
The Workarounds That Took Time
We wanted to make your workflow easier for a simple reason: to increase your productivity. In the past, you had to roll up your sleeves and get creative to develop legends with unique values symbology. Sometimes, this required manually developing your own legend. That meant drawing text blocks, points, and shapes, then carefully arranging everything to look polished before grouping it together. It worked—eventually. But it took additional time.
Another approach you could use? Exporting your map to a different software package just to create a better-looking legend with unique values symbology. Sure, it helped—but once again, you had to add steps to your process, and that wasn’t ideal when there was data to share and deadlines to hit.
Clean, Clear Legends With Unique Values Symbology
With the latest updates in Surfer, creating clear, well-designed legends with unique values symbology is easier and faster than ever. That means no more awkward spacing, misplaced symbols, or long attribute names, leading you to implement tedious workarounds or utilize additional tools. Now, you can have clean, clear legends with unique values symbology because of these improvements in Surfer:
- Symbol justification – Whether you want symbols to align left, right, or center, you’ve got control. No more default placements that don’t fit your layout.
- Name field – If you have an attribute with certain data but don’t want a string of text in your legend, no problem. Now, you can add any value you want using the Name Field.
- Applied properties only – Do you have a mix of object types for attributes, creating a scenario where some properties don’t actually apply to each attribute? The new legend gives you the control to only display what’s used in your map, eliminating any confusing and superfluous samples.
To put the impact of these updates into greater perspective, here’s an example that Golden Software’s Surfer Product Manager Kari Dickenson gave: “Let’s say you’re mapping Nevada, and you have points to represent city names, polygons to represent counties, and polylines to represent roads. When you create your default legend in Surfer, all the points would be in a column, all the polygons would be in a second column, and all the polylines would be in a third column, and then there would be a fourth column for the text name—and people don’t want that layout. The legend becomes too wide, and there could be a lot of blank space. Instead, people want one column that includes the sample, which is the point, polyline or polygon, and a second column for the text name. That’s it. With the updates in Surfer, users will have that clean, clear design.”
What does this mean for your workflow? A more efficient process. You no longer have to jump between different software packages or manually draw anything to create a polished legend with unique values symbology. Just clear, compelling, easy-to-make legends that elevate your maps—all within Surfer.
Bringing It All Together: Legends Made Easy
Creating the sleek legends you need shouldn’t require hours of tedious workarounds or multiple software products. You have better things to do, which is why Surfer’s updates deliver a streamlined way to design the legends your map or model requires to tell a great story.
Ready to simplify your workflow and make legends with unique values symbology clear and compelling? Try Surfer’s new legend features for yourself. They’re currently in Beta, so you can check them out and provide feedback by participating in our Beta program—it’s open to all customers with active maintenance or a subscription. If you don’t meet these qualifications, you can purchase the appropriate license for free access to our Beta program or wait to use the new tools when Surfer 30 is released.
