blog/Alan McConchie

When creating a map, the data that goes into it is just as important as the styles we apply to that data. Data and design are equal partners in the cartographic process, as we’ve often advocated as part of our philosophy of Full Stack Cartography. That’s why we are so excited to share that our...

The State of the Map US (SOTMUS) 2026 conference in Madison, WI was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts, of new friends and familiar faces. I had the chance to give two talks on behalf of Stamen — one about a community research project, and one that was a lot more...

Recently, we worked with the City of Boston’s Office of Emerging Technology to design a prototype curb regulation map, making it easier for Boston residents and visitors to find parking and understand the many overlapping rules and restrictions governing the city’s streets. For most cities, managing curb use is a major challenge that is often...

Stamen is working on a research project about the existing map design and development tooling landscape in advance of a talk we’re planning for the State of the Map US conference in Madison, WI. We’re interested in hearing from folks across the mapping community about what tools they use, where there are gaps, and how...

We’ve made a lot of dark maps over the years at Stamen. We’ll often see dark maps from other designers or commercial providers and think, “why so dark?” We have a philosophy around designing a dark map for a particular client or use case, but we haven’t ever really spelled it out – either internally...

Dark greetings! We’ve been thinking a lot about dark maps in recent months (as Kelsey presented about recently at NACIS) and the thought occurred to us: how quickly could we make a nice dark mode version of Stamen’s iconic Toner style?  As you may recall, a couple years ago we created vectorized versions of our...

A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie and the Stamen Design team Recap Back in 2021, we wrote a two-part blog post about the history of Stamen Design and OpenStreetMap (“OSM” for short), and the twists and turns of Stamen’s close relationship with the OSM project over...

Maps are fascinating things that show us a world that is both deeply personal and excitingly unfamiliar. As professional cartographers, we understand the joy of browsing parts of the world where you’ve never been before, but we also know that the first thing people usually do when they see a map is to find their...

Last year we rebuilt our well-loved Stamen basemaps from scratch, re-creating them on a totally new tech stack in partnership with Stadia Maps. This was a bittersweet and challenging process, trying to build new styles that matched the aesthetics of the old maps, while still giving us a fresh start to keep these maps running...

As self-proclaimed map nerds, there’s nothing like a crossover of nerdy subjects to provoke thought and discussion at Stamen. The new season of House of the Dragon premieres this Sunday, June 16 on HBO and Max in the U.S. and we thought this would be the perfect moment to finally talk about cartography in The...