page_title: Terrain cartography
section_title: Physiographic illustration
hierarchical_section_title: Terrain cartography / Hill profiles / Physiographic illustration
caption_attribution_description: English: Portion of Erwin Raisz's 1941 "Landforms of the Northwestern States" showing the Olympic Peninsula, Puget Sound, and part of southern Vancouver Island. Hand drawn black-and-white map highlighting landform relief such as hills, mountains, and valleys.
context_page_description: Terrain cartography or relief mapping is the depiction of the shape of the surface of the Earth on a map, using one or more of several techniques that have been developed. Terrain or relief is an essential aspect of physical geography, and as such its portrayal presents a central problem in cartographic design, and more recently geographic information systems and geovisualization.
context_section_description: In 1921, A.K. Lobeck published A Physiographic Diagram of the United States, using an advanced version of the hill profile technique to illustrate the distribution of landforms on a small-scale map. Erwin Raisz further developed, standardized, and taught this technique, which uses generalized texture to imitate landform shapes over a large area. A combination of hill profile and shaded relief, this style of terrain representation is simultaneously idiosyncratic to its creator—often hand-painted—and found insightful in illustrating geomorphological patterns.
caption: Section of Raisz' 1941 map of the Northwestern United States, showing his style of landform illustration.
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