Imhof's Mountains: Stealing From the People Who Got Terrain Right

The Man Who Painted Switzerland

In nineteen sixty-five, a Swiss cartographer named Eduard Imhof published a book called Kartographische Geländedarstellung. It was translated into English much later as Cartographic Relief Presentation. It is, by fairly broad agreement, the most important book ever written about how to make terrain look beautiful and true on a flat page.

Imhof was born in eighteen ninety-five and lived until nineteen eighty-six. He was a professor at the federal technical school in Zürich, the ETH, and he spent a working life on one question. How do you take a mountain, a real three-dimensional mountain made of rock and snow and shadow, and put it on a sheet of paper so that a reader feels the mountain rather than just reads its height.

He was not a hobbyist. The maps he and the Swiss school produced are the reason swisstopo, the Swiss national mapping agency, is still considered by many cartographers to make the most beautiful official maps on Earth. When people talk about Swiss style cartography, they are talking, in large part, about the system Imhof wrote down.

And here is why this matters for a centerfold of Jämtland. The fells around Åre are not the Alps, but they are terrain, real terrain with relief and water and snow, and the problems Imhof solved are exactly the problems the gruvor map and the summer map have. He did the research. He wrote it down. The polite thing to do with sixty years of solved problems is to take them.

Aerial Perspective: The Lowlands Go Quiet

The first and biggest idea to steal is something Imhof called aerial perspective, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Look at a real mountain range from a distance. The near ground is sharp, dark, full of contrast and detail. The far peaks are paler, bluer, softer, lower in contrast. This is not your eyes failing. It is the atmosphere. Air is not perfectly clear. Kilometres of it between you and a far ridge scatter the light, wash out the darks, pull everything toward a pale blue-grey. Painters have known this for centuries. It is how you make a flat canvas feel deep.

Imhof's move was to put that into maps on purpose. On an Imhof map, the high terrain is not just lit, it is also crisper and warmer and higher in contrast. The low terrain, the valleys, is rendered softer, cooler, paler, lower in contrast. The map has depth built into it, not because the paper is three-dimensional, but because it borrows the exact cues the eye uses to read distance in the real world.

For the Jämtland maps, this is a direct instruction. The valley floors and the lowlands should be the quiet parts of the basemap. Lower contrast, slightly cooler, slightly paler. The high fells should be where the basemap has its crispness and a touch of warmth. You are not just shading the terrain. You are giving the reader the same atmospheric depth cue they would get standing in the Storlien valley looking up.

And it pairs perfectly with the colour budget. The lowlands going quiet is the basemap doing its job of being ground. The aerial perspective principle and the figure-and-ground principle are the same principle, arriving from two directions.

Warm Advances, Cool Recedes

The second idea is smaller and you can apply it in an afternoon.

Warm colours, reds, oranges, yellows, appear to come toward the viewer. Cool colours, blues, blue-greens, violets, appear to fall back. This is one of the most reliable facts in all of visual art, and Imhof used it constantly and deliberately.

The sunlit slopes of his mountains carry warmth. The shadowed slopes carry cool blue and violet, not neutral grey. The effect is that the lit faces lean toward you and the shadowed faces lean away, and the terrain gains a roundness, a plasticity, that a purely grey hillshade can never have.

This is the hillshade tint from the previous episode, and now it has a name and a reason. When you tint the hillshade shadows cool and the lit faces warm, you are not decorating. You are using a hard fact about human colour perception to make flat terrain bulge off the page. Imhof called the result the plastic effect, plastic in the old sense of sculptural, three-dimensional, modelled. A map with the plastic effect feels like you could run your hand over it.

The same logic extends past the hillshade. The mining symbols, the figure, the thing you want to come forward, can lean warm. The deep context, the things you want to sit back, can lean cool. Warm and cool is a depth control, and most maps never touch it.

Contrast is a Budget, Spend it on the Subject

Imhof wrote a great deal about contrast, and his thinking on it lines up exactly with the colour budget idea, just expressed in a different currency.

His rule, roughly, was that the strongest contrasts on the map should fall on the most important content, and everything else should be held back so that those contrasts have somewhere to land. A map where everything is high contrast is a map where nothing stands out. Contrast only works as a signal if most of the map is not using it.

He applied this even within the terrain itself. The most important peaks, the named ones, the ones the map is really about, could carry the sharpest contrast. The supporting terrain around them was deliberately softened so that it framed rather than competed.

For the gruvor centerfold, this is the instruction to keep the basemap, all of it, in a gentle middle band of contrast, and to save the hard darks and the bright lights for the mining story. For the summer map, it means deciding what the summer map is actually about, the trails, the swimming spots, the viewpoints, whatever it is, and spending the contrast there, and nowhere else.

Contrast is not free. Imhof understood that sixty years ago. Every time you make something high contrast, you spend a little of the map's total attention, and the budget runs out faster than people expect.

Where Else to Look

Imhof is the foundation, but he is not the only place to steal from. A working cartographer keeps a reference library, a folder of maps that do something right, and pulls from it constantly. A few worth having in yours.

National Geographic maps. For most of the twentieth century, the National Geographic Society ran one of the best cartography departments in the world. Their reference and supplement maps are masterclasses in fitting an enormous amount of information onto a page while keeping it calm and readable. Look specifically at how they handle labels, how they handle the hierarchy of place names, and how they integrate terrain with data without either one winning.

Swisstopo, the modern Swiss national maps. The living descendants of Imhof. Look at the rock drawing, the way cliffs and scree are rendered with a fineness that still, in the era of automated everything, partly involves human judgement. You will not reproduce it, but it sets the standard for what terrain can look like.

Historic mining maps. This one is specifically relevant. There is a long tradition of geological and mining cartography, going back centuries, with its own visual language for shafts, seams, claims, and workings. Some of it is gorgeous. For a map that is literally about gruvor, an hour spent looking at old Bergsstaten and Swedish mining district maps is an hour spent finding a visual vocabulary that already belongs to the subject.

Tourist and panorama maps. The painted ski-resort panoramas, the hand-drawn valley maps, the bird's eye views. These are unapologetically about making a place look inviting, which is exactly the summer map's job. They are often technically loose but emotionally precise, and that is a trade worth studying.

The thing to do with the library is not to copy a map. It is to look at one until you can name the specific move that makes it work, and then take that one move. The label hierarchy from National Geographic. The rock texture feeling from swisstopo. The shaft symbology from a mining map. The warmth from a panorama. You are not copying maps. You are collecting techniques.

The Swedish Tradition is Yours Already

There is also a reference library much closer to home, and it is partly already in the gruvor project.

Lantmäteriet, the Swedish mapping authority, has its own long cartographic tradition, and the Topo50 data already in the project is drawn from it. The Fjällkartan, the Swedish mountain maps, the ones hikers actually carry across the fells, are a specific and well-developed style for exactly this terrain. They have decades of refinement behind the question of how to show a Swedish fell so that a person standing on it can read it.

Pulling on that tradition is not just an aesthetic choice. It is a legibility choice and a trust choice. A Jämtland reader has seen Fjällkartan. A centerfold that quietly rhymes with the visual language they already know how to read will feel both more legible and more legitimate. It will feel like it belongs to the place, because the visual conventions do.

This does not mean copying Fjällkartan. It means knowing it well enough that your choices are in conversation with it. When you decide how to render a contour, or a stream, or a peak label, the question to hold is, does this rhyme with what a Jämtland reader already trusts, or does it fight it for no reason.

Imhof on Type

Imhof did not only write about terrain. He wrote about lettering on maps, and several of his principles are worth keeping.

He argued that type on a map should be quiet, not loud, that it should sit on the map without punching a hole in it. He argued for restraint in the number of typefaces and sizes, the same consistency point from the finish episode, arriving again from a different direction. He argued that the placement of a name should follow the thing it names, that a name for a river should flow with the river, a name for a region should spread across the region, a name for a point should sit beside the point in a consistent position.

And he had a specific idea worth stealing for the Jämtland maps. He used type colour, not just type size, to encode category. Water names in a blue. Terrain names in a brown or a warm grey. Settlement names in a near-black. The reader learns the colour code in seconds and then never has to consciously think about it again, because a blue word simply reads as water before they have even finished reading it.

For a forty-layer map with a lot of names competing, that move, colour-coding the type by what it names, is one of the cheapest large gains available. It is a small change in the labelling rules and it makes the whole map quieter to read.

Doing Aerial Perspective in QGIS

The theory is the easy part. Here is roughly how aerial perspective actually gets built in QGIS, because Imhof did it with an airbrush and you have layers and blend modes instead.

The depth cue is driven by elevation, and you already have the elevation. The DEM that the hillshade came from is a continuous surface of height values. That same DEM can drive more than one effect.

One approach is a hypsometric tint, an elevation colour ramp, kept extremely subtle. Not the loud rainbow of an atlas. A whisper. The lowlands carry the faintest cool wash, the highlands the faintest warm one, the whole ramp so quiet it is almost subliminal. Laid under the land cover at low opacity, it does the warm-high cool-low half of aerial perspective across the entire map at once.

The contrast half is trickier but doable. One way is a second, soft, broad hillshade or a blurred version of the DEM used as a mask, so that the low areas receive a thin pale veil and the high areas do not. Another way is simply accepting that aerial perspective is partly a finishing pass, exporting the map, and doing the final lowland softening in an image editor where a gradient mask takes two minutes. Imhof would not have minded. He used whatever tool produced the result.

The point is that the DEM is not used up once you have made a hillshade from it. It is a height surface, and height is the variable that drives depth. Tint by height, soften by height, and the map gains the atmosphere of a real range, all from data already sitting in the project.

What This Means for the Two Maps

Pull it together for the actual deliverables.

For the gruvor centerfold, Imhof's contribution is mostly in the basemap and the terrain. Aerial perspective, so the lowlands go quiet and the high fells stay crisp. The plastic effect, warm lit faces and cool shadowed faces, so the terrain has roundness. Contrast held in a middle band across the basemap so the mining story has somewhere to be loud. Type colour-coded by category so forty layers of names stay calm.

For the summer map, Imhof matters even more, because the summer map's whole job is to make a place look like somewhere you want to be, and that is precisely what Imhof's maps do. They make Switzerland look magnificent and inviting and real, all at once. The summer map should borrow the warmth, the depth, the plastic terrain, and the calm. And it should borrow from the panorama and tourist map tradition for its emotional register, because the summer map is allowed to be a little romantic in a way the gruvor map is not.

In both cases the principle is the same. You are not starting from a blank page and inventing how to make terrain beautiful. People spent the twentieth century solving that, and they wrote it down. Imhof wrote it down most clearly. The work this weekend is not invention. It is informed theft, from the best, applied to one specific corner of Jämtland.

There is a quiet lesson in Imhof himself, too. He spent a whole career, sixty working years, on the single question of how to make terrain true and beautiful on paper. One question, gone deep. The maps that resulted are still the benchmark four decades after his death. You do not have sixty years for the summer edition. You have the weekend. But you have his sixty years available to you, in a book and in every swisstopo sheet, and that is the entire point of a field writing its knowledge down. You get to start where the last person finished.

Next episode: the format itself. One sheet of A3 that has to be a centerfold pull-out and two stand-alone pages at the same time, and where, on a beautiful map, the advertising is actually allowed to live.