Imhof's Mountains: When a Map Becomes a Designed Object

A Swiss Cartographer's Quiet Insistence

In nineteen-sixty-five, a Swiss cartographer named Eduard Imhof published a book titled Cartographic Relief Presentation. The book was about how to show mountains on a map. It was not, on the surface, the kind of book that would change the world. There were no startling theories. There were no political arguments. There were no calls to action. There was just a man, in his late sixties, who had spent his entire working life thinking about how to draw mountains on paper, writing down everything he had learned.

Imhof had been the cartographer in charge of the Swiss national mapping project since the nineteen-thirties. The Swiss have always cared about their maps in a way that other nations do not. The country is small. The mountains are everywhere. The terrain matters intensely to daily life, to military planning, to economic activity, to identity itself. A good map of Switzerland is a kind of national portrait. Imhof had been responsible for producing the best ones for decades.

[calm]

The book he wrote was full of practical instructions. How to choose a color palette so that elevations read intuitively. How to render rock formations to show texture without confusing the eye. How to integrate hillshading with contour lines so the two reinforce each other instead of fighting. How to place labels so they sit on top of features without obscuring them. How to handle the transition between forested and exposed terrain. How to think about lighting as if the sun were coming from the upper left, always, regardless of the actual orientation of the map.

The book was technical and dry. It was also, quietly, a manifesto. The manifesto, never stated directly, was that a map is a designed object, not a data visualization. The data is real. The decisions about how to render it are not data decisions. They are design decisions. They must be made by someone with taste, judgment, and craft. The map is not produced by an algorithm. The map is produced by a person, using algorithms as tools.

This idea has been in tension with the actual practice of map-making for most of the digital era. Computers made it easy to render geographic data automatically. The default outputs were ugly but functional. Most maps produced in the last forty years have been the default outputs. Imhof's insistence on craft has remained a minority position, kept alive by a small community of cartographers who care about the difference between a map and a screenshot.

The Default Map

To appreciate what Imhof was insisting on, you need to look at a default modern map and understand what is missing from it. A default map has roads in red. It has water in blue. It has parks in green. It has buildings in gray. It has labels in black text. It has a uniform color for all unmarked land. It is recognizable as a map. It is also generic.

A default map does not have any of the things Imhof spent his career working on. It does not have lighting. It does not have texture on the terrain. It does not have a sense of how the land actually feels. It does not communicate elevation through color the way an Imhof map does, with subtle shifts from green at low altitudes through ochre in the middle ranges to white at the snowy peaks. It does not have rocks that look like rocks. It does not have forests that look like forests. It does not have water that looks like water. It has water that looks like blue paint.

This is not a criticism. The default map is fine for most uses. It tells you where things are. It is fast to render. It is consistent across all the regions of the world it covers. It is the default for good reasons. But it is not a designed object. It is a rendered version of the data. The data is the same data Imhof would have used. The output is dramatically less.

For most digital map use, the default is appropriate. For journalism, increasingly, the default is wrong. The journalism that uses a map is making a specific argument about a specific place. The map should be specific to that argument and that place. The default map is the same in Sweden as it is in Sicily, and that uniformity drains the journalism of place.

What Cartographic Style Actually Means

Imhof identified a specific set of choices that distinguish a designed map from a default one. The first is color. A designed map uses color to communicate altitude, vegetation, exposure, and human use. The colors should be coherent with each other. They should evoke the actual feel of the terrain. A map of a Norwegian mountain village should not have the same color palette as a map of an Italian olive grove. The palette is the first communicative choice.

The second is lighting. Real terrain has light and shadow. The default map flattens this. A designed map preserves it. The light comes from the upper left, by tradition. The mountains cast soft shadows to the lower right. The valleys are darker in the side facing away from the light. The technique is called hillshading, and it transforms the map from a flat diagram into something with implied dimensionality.

[serious]

The third is texture. The land has rocks, forests, glaciers, scree slopes, agricultural fields, urban patches. A designed map renders these differently from each other, with patterns or shading that suggest the actual surface. A forest is not just green. A forest is a particular kind of textured green that reads as forest. A rock formation is not just gray. It is a particular pattern of light and dark that reads as rock. These textures take work to produce and to integrate gracefully with the rest of the map.

The fourth is hierarchy. A designed map decides what is important and what is not. The most important features are drawn most prominently. The labels for those features are placed first, in larger type. Secondary features are rendered with less weight. The eye is guided through the map by the visual hierarchy, the way the eye is guided through a well-designed page of text by typography and layout.

The fifth, and the one Imhof spent the most time on, is the integration of all these choices into something coherent. A map can have good color and good lighting and good texture and good hierarchy and still feel wrong if the elements do not work together. The integration is the part that resists algorithmic solution. The integration is what a human cartographer does that a default renderer does not.

What Modern Tools Make Possible

Imhof did his work with pen and ink, and later with airbrush and photographic techniques. Producing a single high-quality map could take a year of full-time work. The skills were rare. The Swiss could afford them. Most other countries could not.

Today, the same aesthetic choices can be implemented in software in days rather than years. The free GIS software called QGIS supports all of Imhof's principles. Hillshading, custom color palettes, layer effects, label management, texture overlays, vignette effects, and aerial perspective are all configurable. The software is free. The tutorials are abundant. The community of digital cartographers who care about Imhof-style aesthetics is small but visible.

The shift this represents is meaningful. Forty years ago, designed maps were the province of expensive national mapping agencies and a handful of private firms with deep cartographic traditions. Today, an individual cartographer with a laptop and a few weeks of learning can produce maps that approach the Swiss standard. The democratization of cartographic craft is real, even if it is mostly underused.

The prettymapp Example

There is one specific small project worth mentioning, called prettymapp, written by a German developer named Christoph Rieke. The project takes a piece of OpenStreetMap data, applies a curated visual style, and produces a stylized poster of a city or neighborhood. The styles include hand-drawn aesthetics, vintage geological survey aesthetics, minimalist line work, and several others.

The project is small. The code is short. The license is permissive. The output is not photo-realistic terrain. The output is intentionally stylized, the way a hand-drawn map is stylized, with the visual choices preserved as part of the personality of the map.

The reason prettymapp matters as an example is that it shows the spectrum of what designed cartography can mean. Imhof was making realistic-looking terrain with implied dimensionality. Prettymapp is making something closer to graphic illustration. Both are designed. Both reflect choices about what the map should communicate. Neither is the default. Both have their place in journalism, depending on the story.

A story about a remote mountain village might want Imhof-style realism, with the texture of the terrain communicating the harshness of the place. A story about urban gentrification might want prettymapp-style illustration, with the buildings shown as flat shapes and the streets as graphic lines. The choice of style is itself part of the journalism. The map participates in the argument.

What This Has To Do With Working Journalists

The practical move for a working reporter who uses maps in journalism is to develop a visual language for the publication, and to apply it consistently. The visual language might be Imhof-influenced, with subtle terrain and warm color palettes. The visual language might be prettymapp-influenced, with bold graphic shapes and limited palettes. The visual language might be something else entirely. The choice is not the most important thing. The consistency is.

When every map in a publication shares a visual language, the maps become a signature of the publication. Readers recognize them. The maps become a way the publication establishes its identity. Readers come to expect that the maps will be designed, not generic, and they trust the publication more because of it. The investment in cartographic craft pays back over years, not in any single article but in the cumulative impression of the publication's seriousness.

[calm]

For a small Swedish newspaper covering local stories, the relevant ambition is not to compete with the Swiss national mapping agency. The relevant ambition is to make the maps in the paper look like they belong to the paper, like they could not have come from anywhere else, like they were made by someone who cared. This is achievable. The tools are free. The techniques are documented. The skill takes weeks, not years, to learn at a useful level.

The first map you make in this style takes a long time. The second one takes less. By the tenth map, you have a workflow. By the twentieth, the maps look like a designed series rather than a series of attempts. The compounding is real. The work pays off.

The Larger Argument

The argument Imhof was quietly making in nineteen-sixty-five is the same argument worth making about journalism in general. The default output is fine for most things. The default output is not journalism. Journalism is the application of craft to material that could be presented without craft. The journalism is in the choosing, the framing, the styling, the integration.

A default map of a Swedish mineral permit district shows the data. A designed map of the same district shows the data and communicates something specific about what the district is, what the land is like, what the human presence on the land looks like, how the permit area relates to the surrounding terrain. The data is the same. The journalism is different.

This is true at every level of the publication. The default formatting of an article is fine. The designed formatting communicates the publication's identity. The default rendering of a graph is fine. The designed rendering communicates the specific argument the graph is making. The default photograph is fine. The designed photograph reflects the photographer's eye.

[serious]

Cumulative attention to all these defaults, raising each one slightly above default through specific choices, is what distinguishes a publication that feels designed from a publication that feels generic. The work is unglamorous. The work is also the only thing that distinguishes one publication from another in an era when the data is everywhere and the algorithms are commodity. The craft is the moat. Imhof understood this. The Swiss have always understood this. The rest of the world is catching up slowly, one designed map at a time.

The lesson, for a journalist who works with maps, is to take the time. The defaults will produce a fine map quickly. The fine map will not be memorable. A designed map will take longer. The designed map will be the one that gets the article shared, gets remembered, gets cited. The investment is in the craft. The craft is what the reader feels, even without being able to name what they are feeling. The reader feels that someone cared. That feeling is what journalism is for.