blog/Process

Turning medical data into artful data viz

| 10.02.13

Big data is a big deal, for sure, but small data can be beautiful too. A work of art, even! We’ve been exploring these themes with Wong Doody Crandall Wiener in a new data viz piece in the lobby of Cedars Sinai Medical Center West Hollywood. To house their most state-of-the-art research and outpatient care,...

Stamen maps in Dodocase

| 08.02.13

I’m pleased to announce another product offering from Stamen; to satisfy your map object cravings, we’re partnering with the smarties at Dodocase to bring you custom wooden iPad cases, with maps from themaps.stamen.com project on the inside. For now, they’re available in two styles: a modified version of Toner called Toner-lines and Watercolor, and in...

New & Improved Field Papers!

| 07.10.13

Field Papers is a tool to help you create a multi-page atlas of anywhere in the world. The first version was launched in May of 2012, in partnership with Caerus Associates. In early 2013, we were approached by theU.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to extend Field Papers, and make it more robust. USAID wanted...

How to make 3d maps of Mars

| 06.27.13

Stamen created maps.stamen.com to showcase our cartographic explorations. It’s also a place to stash our mapping experiments (Burning Map; Trees, Cabs & Crime). We recently added a new map: a three-dimensional map of contour lines that compose the surface of Mars. 1. Motivations I started looking for space-related data shortly after hearing news of the...

Map Stack: Maps for all

| 06.12.13

Good-looking maps used to be the domain of experts. That’s been changing quite a bit in the last few years, and it’s easier than ever now for developers to access mapping data (the recent State of the Map USconference was a great place to hear about this). Never content to leave well enough alone, we...

Earthlings! We have built you 3D Mars maps

| 06.05.13

Last week Mike and I were invited to speak at the Jet Propulsion Lab for “Visualization: From Data to Discovery,” a conference about the overlap between data visualization and science. Which would have been interesting enough on its own (because science is awesome), but the icing on the cake was a tour of the Labs....

Facebook Beatquake: What millions of sound waves traveling through Facebook look like

| 05.28.13

Facebook Stories has just released their third visualization project with us, which we’re affectionately calling “Beatquake.” The project is designed to show listening activity across Facebook over the course of 90 days. We were all surprised how popular Thrift Shop by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis is. It blew out most of the investigative charting we...

Facebook: Engineering a Beatquake

| 05.28.13

Today we want to draw back the curtain on our most recent piece for Facebook Stories: Beatquake. More than 110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times through apps integrated with open graph. So what does it look like when a song goes viral on Facebook? Inspired by old-school graphic...

New Work: All Over The

| 05.22.13

The California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF) released an update to their “All Over The Map” survey of elective surgery and other procedure rates across the country yesterday. Funded by CHCF, this research is designed to help Californians understand their local healthcare region performs against the California average. Stamen worked with the CHCF a second time on...

Stamen, Maps, and Brightworks

| 05.04.13

Remember being a kid and daydreaming about what it would be like if school wasn’t just rows of desks and boring classes? What if you could go to a school where, instead of memorizing facts you may never reference again, you learned how to garden, make art, build things (based on math equations!), and work...