blog/Eric Rodenbeck

Mention the term “discovery phase” in a room full of product managers, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, or developers, and you’re certain to garner myriad responses: everything from nods of agreement and appreciation to rolling eyes and exasperated sighs. In fact, in the design and development process of digital products, there’s perhaps no phase that is more...

Acquiring physical art for a museum requires a lot of planning and care. But what does it mean to acquire a digital artifact? You might be surprised to learn it’s less like the acquisition of a painting and more akin to how a zoo acquires a living tiger. In this episode, Andrea Lipps shares some...

In preparation for Earth Day 2023, Stamen Design has been working with our old friend Al Ramadan to make an interactive map of the proposed West Cliff Recreation Area in the city of Santa Cruz, California.

Remote dataviz & maps in the cloud 2022 was our first full year at Stamen being really remote. We’ve been out of our beautiful San Francisco office since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’ve reflected on before, but for the first year or two, we all assumed being remote was temporary. 2021 saw...

One of the biggest myths about data visualization is that you have to have the “right” kind of data to tell compelling visual stories.  But, when data visualization only focuses on leveraging numerical facts, it becomes inherently limiting in ways that science, research and discovery were never meant to be.  There’s a better way.  Researchers...

Researchers are quick to abandon data gaps or anomalies when creating data stories. Learn why digging into missing data helps you tell a more complete story.

We had a great time last month at the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society, talking with old and new friends about a shared love of maps. We also had a record number of team members giving presentations, both about our Stamen work and about some passion projects. We wrote a previous...

Last month I was lucky enough to give a talk at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s annual meeting in Minneapolis, about the golden ratio & how we apply it to our cartographic & data visualization practice at Stamen. The video recording of the talk is here, for those who prefer to watch and listen...

By Eric Rodenbeck and the Stamen Design team One of our favorite conferences of the year is the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS, for short). It’s an eclectic community of academics, professional cartographers, artists, activists, and many other stripes of fascinating creative people who share a love of maps. And...

I was lucky enough to be invited to help teach my pal Janet Abrams’ new design program, Architecture + Design Summer Academy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque last week. I flew(!) in on Sunday, spent a week with Janet and the amazing UNM professor Francisco Uviña helping to shepherd high school students...