blog/Musings

USAID maps used in Afghanistan election coverage

| 08.18.09

Stamen partner Mike Migurski wrote a few days ago about his experience running around on desert military bases, teaching the Army how to use Walking Papers in Afghanistan after an earthquake. It looks like that effort is paying off, in the form of maps of the current Afghan elections; this is from the Global Development...

Lower Manhattan as one big parking lot

| 08.12.09

Our old pal (and semi-recent collaborator) Mike Frumin has been doing some really interesting work on transportation statistics for the City of New York, and his most recent blog post is no exception. It’s about how many extra roads and parking lots you’d need to deploy on and around the island of Manhattan in order...

Can I just say something about the pie of time

| 06.05.09

I know we mentioned it briefly in our post earlier this week about the design update to the Crimespotting project, but I’m so excited about how the project relates to day vs. night that I want to address it a little more directly: It’s pretty good: you can view crimes by time, turning hours on...

Tiny Boxes

| 04.27.09

Stamen eats together. Every day, the studio gets lunch and shares it as a group. Our Mission neighborhood is ground zero for a crazy variety of amazing food, and most of it’s available to-go. As we’ve grown over the years, we’ve started to generate progressively larger volume of packaging waste every day, and finally decided...

Stamen in Icon

| 04.08.09

We’re featured as one of Icon Magazine’s 20 designers who are already changing the way we work and think this month, along with Ben Fry and Casey Reas, Area/Code, Troika, and others. There’s a vote on for which of us is the baddest-ass; you can make your voice heard (and vote for Stamen, if you...

Stamen in Contagious and Esquire

| 12.05.08

Stamen’s had two nice pieces of press lately. We were featured among Esquire’s “new cartographers” (along withLaura Kurgan and Sense Networks) in their “Best and Brightest” issue (out now — it’s the one with Vince Vaughan on the cover), for our recent SFMOMA Artscope project. And the studio is the subject of an essay in this quarter’sContagious...

Buckminster Fuller and the beauty of bubbles

| 08.13.08

‘Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, “That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water — H20 (not Hπ0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am...

Marine microchips, here we go

| 02.14.07

The world’s moving onto the web, all right: Ottowa: Scientists will soon start attaching microchips to fish and other marine animals to track their movements around the world’s oceans and learn how they are being affected by phenomena such as climate change and overfishing, experts said on Monday. — Planetark.com Canada’s Ocean Tracking Network, has...