Cartographic technique for detailing a 'Focus Area'

Question

I'm working on updating a planning document. Whoever was in charge of cartography last time around used a great technique to identify and showcase focus areas (where to focus money and effort for maximum return on investment). I'm trying to use this same type of technique by interpreting and recreating the work-flow.

As you can see, it certainly tells more of the story than a standard flat-filled polygon especially when considering the landscape from a restoration perspective.

The focus area seems to be a terrain / colored hillshade -- could I recreate this with the national elevation dataset (NED) from USGS? Suggestions for a solid workflow to get me going would be great.

Answer 1

I've done maps like this before in ArcGIS years ago. I would clip the elevation raster (usually NED from USGS) to the vector polygon of the study area. Next, create a hillshade of the elevation raster, drape that over the source NED raster, then play around with the transparency/contrast/color ramp of the hillshade to get it to look like I wanted - you might have to create your own custom color ramp by modifying an existing one. Then just overlay all of the that over the counties or states to get the look above. You can overlay the smaller yellow and purple polygons onto the hillshade, then apply a transparency to them as well. By the way, my old stompin' grounds where I grew up are on that map - Santa Rosa County, FL.