cartographymapsprinting
A recent post on Cartastrophe refers to a "Worldwide Campaign to Eliminate Needless North Arrows."
So when, if ever, are North arrows necessary?
As an interesting aside the concept of North being up is not an arbitary one, but in the Northern hemisphere
"due to the visible rotation of the
night sky around the visible celestial
pole"
however
"Chinese and Islamic culture even
considered south as the proper top end
for maps."
For starters, see the following help articles:
To create a custom north arrow symbol in ArcGIS 10, follow these steps:
I was able to use MS Paint to create a 64x64 version of the GIS.SE logo as a north arrow in BMP format (I would have liked to use vector but the vector version of the logo appears to still be MIA). Here's what it looks like on a page layout with a rotated data frame:
See the Working with the page layout section in the documentation - mainly the Map surrounds topic, which provides an overview how the most common map surrounds (legend, scalebar etc.) are structured, followed by Working with map surrounds, which shows how to add these elements to the page layout.
Best Answer
No depending on the Map (90% North is up) dependent on projection
This Map: North is in all directions out from the centre (or South in all directions to the centre) - also has the graticule and text curved inline with the grat.
(uses the polar stereographic projection.)