STAMEN DESIGN MAPS OUT EXPANSION FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE FIELD OF DATA VISUALIZATION:NAMES JON CHRISTENSEN AS PARTNER & OPENS NEW OFFICE IN LOS ANGELES;ANNOUNCES GROUNDBREAKING SOCIAL SENSE-MAKING, ENVIRONMENTAL & MASS MEDIA PROJECTS
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, September 3, 2014 — Stamen Design, known for award-winning design in the field of data visualization and its beautiful and technologically sophisticated mapping projects — laid out its plan today to service the expanding frontier of communications for big data. The San Francisco-based firm announced Jon Christensen as a partner and strategic adviser. Christensen, a veteran journalist (New York Times, High Country News, LA Observed), editor (Boom: A Journal of California), and academic (Stanford, UCLA) is opening a Los Angeles office for Stamen. He will provide an infusion of capital for the company to invest in product development as well as strategic guidance and relationships for expanding business in a range of areas where his own career has developed, including environmental, scientific, journalism, mass media, cultural, museum, library, and educational markets.
The announcement is the latest step in a series of collaborations between Stamen Design and Christensen. As a result of the new partnership, the fortified Stamen has released and is currently developing several new public data visualization projects, including charting the impact of sea level rise on communities nationwide with Climate Central, exploring water quality and quantity risks along with opportunities for conservation in cities worldwide with The Nature Conservancy, helping San Francisco Bay Area museums publicly share data about their collections, and creating new open data and open mapping tools for the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. Additionally, Stamen will use new capital to develop spin-off products and services that flow naturally out of these client projects and can be used by multiple customers to meet their mapping and data visualization needs in commercial, nonprofit, and academic markets.
Eric Rodenbeck, Founder, CEO & Creative Director of Stamen, stated: “With open data, Stamen found an opportunity to connect its experimental and commercial projects to become a leading brand in this field. With Jon’s help, Stamen is poised to substantially expand its reach in commercial, nonprofit, and educational markets. Together, our data visualization tools will drive news, create dialogues, provide key intelligence, influence decisions, and identify potential solutions for the challenges facing our most important natural and cultural resources. We announce Jon’s partnership, our new Los Angeles office, and our future work together with great enthusiasm, having found in him the partner who can extend our reach while confirming and enhancing all of Stamen’s existing strengths.”
“I am thrilled to be joining Stamen Design as a partner and am tremendously excited to head the company’s Los Angeles office,” Christensen said. “I’ve followed Stamen’s work closely over the years as a researcher, historian, journalist, educator, and curator of public projects. Data visualization, digital mapping, and interactive storytelling are becoming increasingly important in these areas. Stamen is the place you go when you’re ready to get serious about communicating with your data, and I’m excited to see our clients come to us with questions about the use of visualization across the spectrum from history to science, finance to logistics. It’s great to be at the forward edge of discovering what’s possible with mapping and data, and I’m looking forward to helping Stamen continue to thrive there.”
About Jon Christensen
Jon Christensen has been an environmental journalist and science writer for more than 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, the San Francisco Chronicle, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. He is the editor of Boom: A Journal of California, a quarterly magazine published by the University of California Press that brings scholars, researchers, writers, artists, policymakers, and the public into common conversations about California in the world; and a regular columnist at LA Observed. He is an adjunct assistant professor, journalist-in-residence, and senior fellow in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, the Center for Digital Humanities, and cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to UCLA, Jon served as executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media, and journalism at Stanford University. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002–2003 and serves as a trustee on the board of the California Historical Society.
About Stamen
Since 2001, Stamen Design has led the field of interactive mapping and data visualization. The studio builds beautiful, technically sophisticated projects for a diverse set of clients. Stamen combines strong creative strategy, design, engineering and software development. The studio complements the expertise of its clients through collaborations that bring to life a wide range of compelling interactive mapping and data visualization projects. Stamen’s interests, process and disciplines apply across a wide swath of industries and project types. The work ranges from elegant and utilitarian maps to entertaining data visualizations for MTV and artistic and evocative works in MOMA. Stamen designs with real data, not ideas of what data could or should be. The studio designs and builds dozens of custom projects a year, many of them pushing the boundaries of creativity and technology. Stamen also participates in many of the communities that develop and support open data and open source software. This keeps the studio’s design and technical capabilities broad and deep, and helps provide the best sustainable solutions for clients.
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