blog/Musings

Members Join Forces Around Commitment to Improving Representation of Black Creatives in Design, Increasing Design Career Opportunities and Focusing on the Education Pipeline to Create Long Term and Lasting Change Founding members include 2×4, Adobe, Architecture Plus Information, Aruliden, Civilization, COLLINS, Dropbox, Fossil Group, Freeman, fuseproject, Gap Inc., Herman Miller Group, Knoll Inc., Levi Strauss...

[Last week, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum announced that Stamen’s Watercolor map tiles would be added to their permanent collection. As part of that announcement, they released a 5 minute video showing Stamen Design founder Eric Rodenbeck talking about the origins and reception of the Watercolor map. This is post is a brief transcript...

(with apologies & in homage to Rainer Maria Rilke and William Burroughs) From time to time I get asked for advice by young people about paths to careers in dataviz. My path to the field started over twenty years ago. There was no Masters of Data Visualization at the New School when I went there,...

Dataviz is clearly having a moment in the COVID-19 and social justice crisis — perhaps a definitive moment. Every time I turn around I see another chart, set of small multiples, dashboard. Some of them are great, some of them are just so-so, and some of them are actively dangerous, just like any other form of expression...

I was lucky enough to be invited to give the first talk at Visualized 2019 in San Francisco last week. Tamara Munzner, whose book we have at HQ, talked about encoding data. Vetria Byrd teaches dataviz to undergrad students and is seeking to broaden participation in the field. Steve Franconeri discussed principles for annotating visualizations...

I’ve been using OpenStreetMap (OSM) for over 12 years now, and to this day I’m still impressed and amazed by how far this project has come. The audacity of OpenStreetMap’s core ideals — that volunteers can create and maintain a detailed map of the world, and that this collaborative map would be more democratic and fair than...

“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.” — Manuel Lima, quoting computer scientist Ben Schneiderman “Data visualization is not your creative outlet; data visualization is making data understandable.” — OpenVizConf “[Before the Data Viz Project] there [was] no one place to go, where there are the correct answers for how the data visualizations work.” — Jeppe “Yes, you can design...

The National Design Award-winning interactive designer has a simple method for selecting typefaces—as detailed in his 20 year career designing for the web

Sunrise through the smoke from Eve’s apartment Things have been pretty grim around here. The fires north of San Francisco have been just devastating for so many people. It’s intensely personal for the people who work here at Stamen, particularly those of us with deep roots in that part of the world. So many of...

At Stamen we’ve passed the last month with a growing sense of concern and unease at the direction that our current President is trying to take the United States. I’m concerned that this administration is recklessly careening forward to do what it can to undermine the checks and balances that have kept this democracy vibrant....