The "raster" theme was an open prompt — an open invitation to work with continuous surface data instead of discrete points, lines, or polygons. Elevation was the obvious candidate, and the obvious style to reach for was Eduard Imhof's: relief shading that reads as hand-painted terrain rather than a mechanical hillshade.
The Imhof style
Classic Imhof shading pairs hypsometric tinting (color keyed to elevation) with directional shading tuned by hand rather than a single flat light-and-azimuth calculation, so ridgelines and valleys read with more depth than a default hillshade gives you. It's a technique built for paper maps in the 1960s that still looks better than most default GIS renderers on a screen.
Building it in ArcGIS Pro
The elevation surface came straight from Esri's Terrain Service in Living Atlas — no local DEM to manage. The symbology follows John Nelson's published modern take on the Imhof technique, tuning color ramp and light angle against Utah's terrain until the Wasatch Range, the Basin and Range country, and the Colorado Plateau each held their own texture instead of collapsing into flat gray.
Why raster, not vector
Vector data is the right tool when features are genuinely discrete — parcels, roads, boundaries. Terrain isn't: elevation is continuous everywhere, and a raster surface is what lets shading pick up every ridge and drainage without simplifying them into lines first. That's exactly the case a raster-only prompt is built to highlight.
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.