blog/Stamen Design

Later today, I’ll be joining a panel discussion at SPUR talking about how urban agents are changing our cities, with local design and infrastructure smarties like Raphael Garcia from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission & Nancy Levinson from Design Observer. On my radar: welcome urban innovations like parklets, less-popular (or at least more controversial)...

Lock Batman, Hulk, Iron Man, Catwoman, a mercenary Snow White and antihero Bilbo Baggins in a room. Make ’em fight. Who wins? Our latest social vote project for MTV’s 2013 Movie Awards gives a realtime window into this virtual bloodbath. Poom! Leading up to the April 14 awards show, fans are casting votes for this...

Stamen has been working with 3d data from HERE for a few months now, and it’s time to start being public about that. You can skip to the good stuff by heading over to http://here.stamen.com/ and explore for yourself, or take a look at what follows for some more details & rationale. The Story: Here,...

As I’ve done before once or twice, I got excited enough talking about the projects we’ve been working on that I ran a bit over during my talk today and didn’t get to the questions I wanted to ask the lovely audience at Webstock to help me answer. Suddenly there was a “0 minutes left”...

Nice indeed for our watercolor maps to be included in the It’s Nice That 2012 Annual. It’s even nicer to receive a hard copy of the beautiful Annual in all its glory, and to see our work nestled amongst gorgeous, creative, dynamic work from around the world. There’s always a lot of discussion about the...

All right! It’s 2013 & I have all kinds of new business to report. Back in 2002, when I was first getting serious about Stamen, I got my first real gig: my friend Dane Howard (formerly of Quokka Sports) connected me with some friends of his at DesignworksUSA, who were looking for a way to...

Friends of the internet! In a few days the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body made up of governments around the world, will be meeting in Qatar to re-negotiate International Telecommunications Regulations. These meetings will be held in private and behind closed doors, which many feel runs counter to the open nature of the internet....

By Nathaniel, cross posted from http://kelsocartography.com/ I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Natural Earth 2.0.0! The 2.0.0 release focuses on 7 major areas and is available to download today à la carte at NaturalEarthData. ZIP combo downloads of all vectors: SHP (279 mb) or SQLite (222 mb) or QuickStart kit for ArcMap...

I went to my first Open Street Map conference recently — State of the Map US, in Portland. Stamen was one of the conference sponsors, along with MapBox, and ESRI and TeleNav, among others, and it’s great to see and be part of the different industries come together to support this effort. I went with Mike and...

This is a follow-up post about the piece we launched last week on Facebook Stories called “Data Visualization: Photo-Sharing Explosions.” The project took us a little over 2 weeks from start to finish, and we wanted to show you a bit about how we got to the final piece. The Facebook team asked us to...