blog/Process

Grasses, Watermen & Bathymetry

| 04.22.13

Today we’re announcing a new cartography and storytelling project called Chesapeake Bay Grasses with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), a partnership of federal, state, non-profit organizations and academic institutions dedicated to the protection and restoration of the Bay. Stamen has been working with the CBP to develop a visual story about the health of the...

Pow! Thwok! Happy Monday.

| 04.05.13

Lock Batman, Hulk, Iron Man, Catwoman, a mercenary Snow White and antihero Bilbo Baggins in a room. Make ’em fight. Who wins? Our latest social vote project for MTV’s 2013 Movie Awards gives a realtime window into this virtual bloodbath. Poom! Leading up to the April 14 awards show, fans are casting votes for this...

Announcing here.stamen.com

| 03.27.13

Stamen has been working with 3d data from HERE for a few months now, and it’s time to start being public about that. You can skip to the good stuff by heading over to http://here.stamen.com/ and explore for yourself, or take a look at what follows for some more details & rationale. The Story: Here,...

Google: #freeandopen

| 12.03.12

Friends of the internet! In a few days the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body made up of governments around the world, will be meeting in Qatar to re-negotiate International Telecommunications Regulations. These meetings will be held in private and behind closed doors, which many feel runs counter to the open nature of the internet....

Natural Earth v.2.0.0 is live

| 11.09.12

By Nathaniel, cross posted from http://kelsocartography.com/ I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Natural Earth 2.0.0! The 2.0.0 release focuses on 7 major areas and is available to download today à la carte at NaturalEarthData. ZIP combo downloads of all vectors: SHP (279 mb) or SQLite (222 mb) or QuickStart kit for ArcMap...

Facebook: Evolution of the Flowers

| 10.17.12

This is a follow-up post about the piece we launched last week on Facebook Stories called “Data Visualization: Photo-Sharing Explosions.” The project took us a little over 2 weeks from start to finish, and we wanted to show you a bit about how we got to the final piece. The Facebook team asked us to...

Facebook: mapping how viral photos spread

| 10.11.12

Following up on last month’s map of the world’s friendships on Facebook, we’ve released another visualization of relationships across social networks today. Called “Photo-sharing Explosions,” these visualizations look at the different ways that photos shared on George Takei’s Facebook page go viral once he’s posted them. Each visualization is made up of a series of...

New Designs for Yandex Maps

| 10.10.12

A lot of what we do at Stamen is inventing things that haven’t been done before; pushing the technical envelope on something like scary cartography, or inventing new techniques to animate the effects of climate change due to global warming. It’s fun, and it’s definitely a big part of what keeps my creative juices flowing:...

Comparing energy efficiency in the San Gabriel Valley

| 10.01.12

We’ve launched a new project for PMC, a consulting firm that advises municipalities on things like transit policy and energy use. Energy Efficiency in San Gabriel Valley looks at a variety of cities in southern California and reports how much electricity and natural gas people used, how far they drove, how much waste they generated,...

Map2Image: better, faster, stronger

| 10.01.12

The Map to Image bit of maps.stamen.com has seen steady use since we launched it in September: close to six thousand images made, about half of those watercolor, a third toner, about one every ten minutes. We’ve made some adjustments and improvements to it that should make it even easier to use, and easier to...