Switzerland: A Map That Makes Mountains Pop

Most digital maps make mountains look flat. When mapping Switzerland, this isn't an option, though. 60% of its area is covered by the Alps, with a huge number of peaks rising higher than 4000m. A map with famous mountains like the Matterhorn or the Jungfrau, as well as even higher ones such as the Dom or the Dufourspitze – Switzerland's highest mountain in the Monte Rosa massif – demands a treatment that lets the mountains speak for themselves.

It's no surprise that Swiss cartographers were the first to consistently use what's now called hillshading to create a 3D-like appearance of hills and mountains. Of course, the technique of shaded reliefs was used before. In the Renaissance, artists like Jos Murer and even Leonardo da Vinci drew maps this way, but it was Swiss pioneers like Guillaume Henri Dufour [1] and later Eduard Imhof [2] that transformed the primarily aesthetic art into a science, combining scientific precision with design principles.

Where earlier cartographers had to master drawing techniques like hatching or airbrushing, we now have very capable software that makes the process considerably easier. Nonetheless, applying principles like "less often means more" is still a difficult task when creating maps. For my Switzerland map, it took many iterations until I found a good balance between the labels for the cities and peaks and the visually dominating mountain ranges with their nicely rendered hill shades.

Still, as no map can show everything, you'll find more versions of my Swiss maps on the website: https://mapswire.com/maps/switzerland/ – even blank maps you can use as a starting point for your own mapping experience.

I have made a high-resolution version of today’s map (4564×2846 / 1.2 MB) available on the Mapswire website exclusively for my subscribers. You can access the full-scale image via the link below. This map is released under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license – you are free to share, use, or redistribute the map as long as you attribute it to Mapswire. Click here to download the high-resolution map from mapswire.com.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographic_Map_of_Switzerland
[2] https://ikgrelief.ethz.ch/cartographers/imhof/