blog/Stamen Design

So from time to time I kick myself for not being as disciplined as, say Matt Webb, who seems to be able to effortlessly kick out a weekly digest of his studio’s activities. It’s important, I tell myself. It’s a great way to get your ideas out there, I say, with some guilt. Writing things...

One of the great things about being involved with projects like twitter visualizations of the Olympics is being able to look back at an event that basically the whole world is paying attention to, and seeing the way that attention was focused at events that make their way into culture and our collective memory. Sunday’s...

I’ve been feeling for some time now that the data visualization space is about to go completely bananas, where “bananas” means “taken for granted” in the sense that no major cultural event will feel complete without a corresponding live data visualization. The breadth and depth of the conversation happening on twitter around the Olympics is...

Ben took our show on the road yesterday, speaking about live data visualization at the Webtrends Engage conference in New Orleans. I really like the format that the presentations were in: twice as wide as a normal slide deck and right behind the speakers, so Ben could stride the boards, point at interface elements, walk...

The Hope For Haiti telethon is winding down and by all accounts things the after party is going smoothly. The live map we designed & built for MTV is here, there’s some conversation going on about it here, and it looks something like this when it’s in full swing: It’s early Saturday morning in Munich,...

We’re back in the saddle again after closing the studio for the last two weeks of December. It always confounds me how surprised people are when we say we’ll be closed for that long, as though it were excessive. That amount of time feels to me about the minimum I’d want to genuinelystart to unwind,...

As previously mentioned, Cabspotting has been getting successively less live GPS taxi data from Yellow Cab during the last few months, resulting in an anemic and much spindlier (spindlier?) view of San Francisco than is normal when it’s in a healthy state: Being Stamen, of course we didn’t think to just pick up the phone...

Our second full week in Stamen HQ2 still found us wandering around the new space, blinking at the possibilities. There’s a whole room full of empty and as-yet-uncrushed boxes, a room full of my old stuff (I used to live at Stamen HQ1, back in the day), a room with mostly plant-free large pots from...

We spent our first full week in the new studio, which I’m calling Stamen HQ2. It’s been a good week — HQ2 is a bit larger than we’re used to (and truth be told, comfortable with) so we’re still in that stage where we’re wandering around looking into corners and trying out the distances between the rooms....

Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve needed to kick a coconut into all the corners of a new space (to absorb any potential bad juju, naturally) before moving in, but: here we go again! The capable and strapping men at Bay City Movers have just spent about 9 hours on Tuesday loading all...