The "raster" theme asks for continuous surface data instead of points, lines, or polygons. Elevation was the clear choice. For the style I used Eduard Imhof's relief shading, which reads like hand-painted terrain instead of a mechanical hillshade.
The Imhof style
Imhof shading combines hypsometric tinting (color keyed to elevation) with directional shading that is tuned by hand instead of one flat light-angle calculation. Ridgelines and valleys get more depth than a default hillshade gives them. The technique was made for paper maps in the 1960s, and it still looks better on a screen than most default GIS renderers.
Building it in ArcGIS Pro
The elevation surface comes from Esri's Terrain Service in Living Atlas, so there was no local DEM to manage. The symbology follows John Nelson's modern version of the Imhof technique. I adjusted the color ramp and light angle against Utah's terrain until the Wasatch Range, the Basin and Range country, and the Colorado Plateau each kept their own texture instead of going flat gray.
Why raster, not vector
Vector data is the right tool for discrete features such as parcels, roads, and boundaries. Terrain is different. Elevation is continuous everywhere, and a raster surface lets the shading pick up every ridge and drainage without simplifying them into lines first.
Originally created for the “Raster” theme of the 2024 #30DayMapChallenge, styled after Eduard Imhof's technique as adapted by John Nelson, using Esri's Living Atlas Terrain Service.