This map of Swiss landscapes was make to be reminiscent of the mid-century pen-and-ink landform maps of Erwin Raisz.
The background is a repeating poster-print texture applied to a big polygon that covers the whole world.
I started with water polygons and gave them a hatched fill with an alternating texture to get a bit more hand-drawn-y. This is just a stack of three largely-spaced hatched fills that all combine to add a dense horizontal hatched fill with a bit of variation.
Then I added a Digital Elevation Model layer and derived a hillshade. The light-source was a low-angle imaginary sun placed in the southwest, like Raisz did. I applied an abrupt color scheme so that only northeast slopes are shaded to full black, leaving the res of the hillshade content transparent.
I used the DEM to create a vector polygon layer of a handful of discrete slope angles and aspect angles. I unioned them into a single, pretty complex, polygon layer of slope and aspect.
Within many of the slope/aspect polygons I applied a hatched fill, angled to appear as mountain hachures.
Then I focused the area of interest by adding a country polygon layer and hiding Switzerland, to serve as an overlay. The fill used the same paper texture as the background and I gave the border a dashed pattern like I’d seen in some of Raisz’s work.
Then I added an overview globe at a strong oblique angle, another nod to Raisz, and applied some landscape labels to invisible polygons.
And that was that! If you’d like to follow along a more detailed how-to, then check this post from the Esri ArcGIS blog. Alternatively, you can just download the source ArcGIS Pro project.
Happy Mid-Century Mapping! John
Adventures In Mapping 