blog/Musings

One of these days I’ll get around to updating the maps section of our site, ’cause things’ve changed since theCalifornia Stimulus Map (although I still think the Robert Louis Stevenson quote is pretty good, it’s basically 1/2 of our whole business plan). In the meantime I wanted to share a few things that Mike Bostock,...

Mike & Sha just left the studio for LA, where they’re putting the finishing touches on a twitter visualization for use during MTV’s Hope for Haiti telethon tomorrow. More on this as it progresses, but I’m very excited about this one. We’re going to be visualizing live activity around the world during the telethon, similar...

I’m in Boston today with Deborah, Tom & Ben, where the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Knight News Challenge, has just announced that Stamen is one of the winners of this year’s Knight News Challenge grant. The grant is funding the development of City Tracking, which will present digital...

So from time to time I kick myself for not being as disciplined as, say Matt Webb, who seems to be able to effortlessly kick out a weekly digest of his studio’s activities. It’s important, I tell myself. It’s a great way to get your ideas out there, I say, with some guilt. Writing things...

We’re back in the saddle again after closing the studio for the last two weeks of December. It always confounds me how surprised people are when we say we’ll be closed for that long, as though it were excessive. That amount of time feels to me about the minimum I’d want to genuinelystart to unwind,...

Our second full week in Stamen HQ2 still found us wandering around the new space, blinking at the possibilities. There’s a whole room full of empty and as-yet-uncrushed boxes, a room full of my old stuff (I used to live at Stamen HQ1, back in the day), a room with mostly plant-free large pots from...

We spent our first full week in the new studio, which I’m calling Stamen HQ2. It’s been a good week — HQ2 is a bit larger than we’re used to (and truth be told, comfortable with) so we’re still in that stage where we’re wandering around looking into corners and trying out the distances between the rooms....

Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve needed to kick a coconut into all the corners of a new space (to absorb any potential bad juju, naturally) before moving in, but: here we go again! The capable and strapping men at Bay City Movers have just spent about 9 hours on Tuesday loading all...

Sha and I were walking along 6th Street in San Francisco the other day,and Sha noticed one of my favorite views:Stevenson Street from 6th towards 5th, recently enhanced by the monumental bulk of Morphosis’ new-ish San Francisco Federal Building looming up behind, all Blade Runner in San Francisco-style. Google shows it OK, Microsoft’s birds-eye is...

The State of California launched our most recent project today, a closer look at the $5.6 billion in Federal Stimulus funds that the State has received so far. There’s alot there and I hope you’ll go play with it yourself but the main thing I want to say is that you can slice and dice...