To achieve the design tenet "providing various products, and extending service sphere" of National Western Mapping Program, the product pattern of the whole program and Topographic Map Product Pattern are established according to the product concept of ISO 9000. In order to provide users with more diverse varieties of new GIS products that contain richer content, it is proposed that image topographic maps and hill-shading topographic maps should be produced as the DLG (Digital Line Graphic) topographic maps offered in the 1:50 000 topographic mapping of blank areas in the western region, China. In this paper we firstly described the product pattern and Topographic Map Product Pattern of National Western Mapping Program respectively. Then, taking the design and realization of the 1:50 000 Image Topographic Map as an example, we introduced design points in detail about how to develop a new type map product, including the contents contained in the Image Topographic Map and principles about how to represent them. Now, the technical specification document that specify how to produce image topographic maps have been put forward based on some experiments, and the study results have been applied to the 1:50 000 topographic mapping of blank areas in the western region project to guide the production of image topographic maps. In this paper we demonstrated that the image topographic maps are good supplementary products for topographic maps, which can provide more texture information for users.