Imagine you’re going out of town this weekend. You check the weather forecast where you’re headed and see clear, sunny days, so you make sure you pack your sunglasses in your bag. Next, you check the public health trends where you’re going and see COVID-19 is high. So, you tuck away your face mask next...
In August 2023, Stamen started working with the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy. The focus of our work was their keystone product, the Distressed Communities Index (DCI) interactive dashboard. The DCI highlights economic disparities in U.S. communities at several geographic levels,...
Dealing with the occasional 100-year storm or drought are problems farmers have had to deal with for centuries, but what happens when those weather events become the norm? Climate change will test agriculture practices across the globe in ways humans can’t fully predict. Many country’s harvests are already feeling these effects and will continue to...
The Max Planck Institute hired Stamen a few years back to create a website to visualize increasingly complex urban transformations due to immigration for a project called Superdiversity. The site we created contains multiple interactive charts of census data to enable better research, analysis, and discussion of this novel phenomenon. Because diversity patterns in cities...
As we mentioned recently, Stamen worked with Densho in 2023 to create Manzanar CloseUp, a map of the Manzanar concentration camp in California where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Where our previous work on Sites of Shame visualizes all of the camps that existed and the aggregated movement of individuals to and from camps,...
Back in 2021, Stamen began working with Densho, a nonprofit committed to documenting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on American soil during WWII. Together, we worked to tell the stories of the 125,000 imprisoned individuals through a map-based visualization called Sites of Shame. In 2023, we collaborated again to develop Manzanar...
When we started thinking about how to recreate Stamen’s iconic Toner and Terrain raster styles with vector data, Toner seemed like it would present the bigger challenge. Achieving the right hierarchy and visual balance of that style felt like a monumental task to me, an ardent admirer of Toner for many years. Terrain was less...
Not long after Stamen created our first Toner, Watercolor, and Terrain styles, a new technology came along: vector maps. Though it still used the paradigm of dividing up the world into map tiles, vector maps divide up the data into pre-processed chunks instead of the map itself. In vector cartography, the map is drawn dynamically...
Since 2011, Stamen has provided basemaps built upon OpenStreetMap (OSM), but it’s been several years since we updated the underlying data in them. We received a grant from the Knight Foundation a few years after their release to refresh Toner and Terrain, but it’s no small feat to keep a worldwide map updated with the...
Earlier this year, Amazon Location Service launched their Open Data Maps collection, and with it four new map styles that Stamen designed. This wasn’t just any project for us. As Kate Leroux, Stephanie May, and Seth Fitzsimmons explained at State of the Map in Richmond in June, it was a chance to showcase not only...