blog/Musings

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...

We’re the cover story (!) of this month’s Icon Magazine, featured alongside my longtime heroes at the Center for Land Use Interpretation as part of the maps issue. Ari Messer did a terrific job on the interview, and R.C. Rivera spent an afternoon photographing our plant- and map-filled studio with some lovely results. Unfortunately Shawn...

Nathaniel showcased nearly two years of City Tracking in Boston last Monday at the MIT/Knight Story and the Algorithm conference. You can read about this years’ winners here, as well about the changing nature of the grant: shorter cycles, more opportunities to apply, that kind of thing. It’s worth a look. The City Tracking project...

There are cupcakes with Stamen maps on them. Each one has a single tile printed on it. Cups and Cakes Bakery baked and prepared them. They were made for the Where 2.0 conference, where Mike is talking about how Old Is The New New and I am talking about Drawing Outside the Lines, which taken...

We added six(!) amazing people to our team last year, which brings us up to thirteen. As I’ve got two days left in the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take a crack at welcoming our new collaborators in public. The studio has a longish history of encouraging its members to turn their personal...

It’s been a busy summer, and we’ve got a few things to share. We’re hiring a Developer We’re ready to hire again! If this is you, or someone like you, get in touch, wouldja? Stamen’s work is a creative fusion of design and technology, front-end and back-end. Behind the maps and visualizations in our projects...

One of the great things about Eric Fischer’s map experiments on Flickr is that he actually takes the time to geolocate everything. So if he’s making, say, a map of where people tweet vs where they upload photos in Montreal, the photo will tell you that it was taken in Montreal. Or if it’s he’s...

Sometimes I wish I could be as disciplined as my friends at Berg, who’ve been faithfully writing up weeknotes rain or shine for 308 weeks now. These days it’s a struggle to even participate in all the things that are going on around the studio, much less write about it. In my head sometimes we’re...

Stamen was featured in the New York Times business section yesterday. Like, the actual paper version of the paper, the one with the crossword puzzle (thanks John Poisson for the photo): Three things are insanely great about this: We’re there alongside industry smarties like Hans Rosling, Ben Shneiderman, and Jim Bartoo. This is good company....

We’ve — finally! — collaborated with the fabulous Jen Bekman’s 20×200 on a print edition of a Stamen project, Prettymaps. 20×200 makes it possible for people to buy art at whatever level they’re comfortable, from $20 to $200, and the project has put art into the hands of lots of people who wouldn’t otherwise afford it, so good on...