blog/Musings

Two weeks ago, we were horrified to learn that our friend and Stamen alum Zach Watson was fighting for his life after having been the victim of a car crash that injured six people in the Tenderloin. He’s been in critical condition since then. I’m so very sorry to have to tell you that Zach...

Recently the fine folks at WIRED’s Map Lab asked for a checklist for maps. We have a list of interaction design-related things we like to ensure across all of our map projects which we thought you might be interested to see. Happy mapping! URLs should contain and maintain state, by default. This feature means that...

When I first moved to San Francisco from Atlanta a few years ago, the first thing that struck me about the city (aside from the expensive everything) was the pace. People here go so fast, how can they possibly stop and smell the roses? Our speed at Stamen often reflects the pace of this city,...

In late February 2014 MtGox, one of the oldest Bitcoin exchanges, filed for bankruptcy protection. On March 9th a group posted a leak of MtGox data, which included the trading history of users from April 2011 to November 2013. We’ve been collaborating with Kai Chang & Mary Becica on some visualizations of this data; they’re...

Hear this: the billboard space at 14th and Valencia shall forever henceforth be known as Stamen Watercolor Billboard. Working with an anonymous benefactor, we generated what I think is the largest of our maps so far: 25 by 12 feet, big enough for our whole team to cavort along. It’s right down the street from...

Over the summer, Stamen was joined by Zoe Padgett, an intern studying a Masters of Fine Arts in Media Design Practices from the Art Center College of Design. We were delighted to have her join us, and all tickled by the work you see below. My first week at Stamen, Art Director George Oates gave...

News flash: maps transform from paper things to digital things to things all over the map with maps all over them. We were delighted to receive an invitation to the Stanford Cool Product Expo, a yearly showcase of innovative companies and products produced by Stanford’s MBA students. Stamen was one of 45 producers invited to...

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)...

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...