Terrain cartography, or relief mapping, focuses on depicting the Earth's surface shape, a fundamental aspect of map design. Early methods, such as simple hill profiles, evolved into more sophisticated physiographic illustrations by figures like A.K. Lobeck in 1921 and Erwin Raisz, inspiring modern computer-generated techniques like Tom Patterson's plan oblique relief. Another key method, hachures, standardized by Johann Georg Lehmann in 1799, uses lines to effectively communicate slope orientation and steepness, particularly for low relief.
However, the most common quantitative approach, contour lines (or isohypses), emerged in 18th-century France, representing isolines of equal elevation and defining features of "topographic maps." Further enhancing contour visualization, Professor Tanaka Kitiro developed Tanaka contours in 1950, which illuminate contour lines based on a light source to better illustrate terrain.