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...
Show don’t tell. It’s what we are taught from a very young age and continue to employ everyday, be it at school, work, or even in conversations with our friends. This phrase has stood the test of time as being the most powerful way to convey information. Actions, words, thoughts, senses, feelings, and even data...
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...
It’s been a year of ups and downs—quite literally if you’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) like we have. The long-awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild (BotW) was one of the top-rated games to release in 2023 and surpassed the seemingly impossible standard set by its predecessor. Last...
One of our biggest projects last year was an update of our classic basemap styles, working hard with our partners at Stadia to adapt these maps to modern infrastructure and keep them running for years to come. As of October 31, we completed the transition and all our basemap users are now using Stadia’s infrastructure....
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...
At Stamen, our appreciation and opinions of maps go beyond just our professional work here and often bleed over into our personal interests as well. Our eye for interactivity, color palettes, contour lines, and labels doesn’t stop once we log off at the end of the day. As we covered in a previous post by...
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...
As cartographers, we want to make beautiful maps that grab our readers’ attention. Sometimes we wish our maps could jump out of the screen or off the page, and with a recent trend in cartography we’re starting to see more and more maps that seem to do just that. New technology combined with high-resolution elevation...