blog/Process

Designing for all audiences: Mapping the future of food

| 02.29.24

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...

Refactoring a dataviz website to create an extensible application

| 02.21.24

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...

Manzanar UpClose In-Depth

| 02.08.24

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,...

Visualizing Japanese American Confinement with Densho

| 12.19.23

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...

Stamen x Stadia series: Terrain behind the scenes

| 10.17.23

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...

Stamen x Stadia: harnessing modern vector cartography

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...

Stamen x Stadia: familiar maps, brand new data

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...

Open Data Maps for AWS

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...

Dreamy, aspirational cartography with Spherical

| 08.10.23

Earlier this year, Stamen collaborated to design a custom branded basemap with our friends at Spherical, a creative technology design and integrative research studio supporting projects regenerating the health and integrity of Earth’s living systems. In partnership with ARLA, Spherical supports community workshop facilitators with their Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a space to explore the...

The Notion of “Data-Driven Products” Isn’t New. But You Need a Strategy.

Not all “data-driven insights” are valuable to pursue for the sake of your product vision. But which data is valuable for your product and business goals and which can you leave behind? First, it’s the quality of data that matters—not just the quantity. Quality data that precisely matches your business case isn’t going to be...