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:...
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,...
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...
Stamen alum Sha Hwang and I shared a stage last night at Arkitektura’s Design Assembly in their lovely Soma showroom. Besides the obvious awesomeness of sharing a stage with Sha (whose work at Trulia is up there with the best), it’s always fun to talk to an audience of designers; their focus on how things...
A new installment in our continuing study of Bay Area infrastructure is live, at https://stamen.com/zero1. Some early coverage of the project here and here. We’ve mapped the Bay Area’s crime and taxis before, but in each case a source of data was readily available for the taking. In this case, we decided to try something...
Today we launched “Mapping the World’s Friendships,” a project visualizing the degree of interconnectedness between Facebook’s hundreds of millions of members as part of Facebook’s new Storiesinitiative. Countries are sorted by a combination of how many Facebook friendships there are between countries, and the total number of Facebook friendships there are in that country. Turns...
Since launching maps.stamen.com and making the maps available for purchase in select cities on 20×200we’ve been lucky enough to receive a steady trickle of interest from people who want to print the maps themselves. For those unlucky enough to have missed the watercolor letterpress map that went out withJason Kottke’s marvelous Quarterly.co subscription service, we’re...
In 2008 we designed a hurricane tracker for MSNBC, right as Irene was “bearing down on Louisiana like a shotgun full of wind and rain.” The project worked fine for several seasons of hurricanes and tropical storms, until Apple killed Flash in 2011 and the world of interactive mapping and data visualization turned its attention...
Every year around this time in San Francisco things start to feel a little rushed, and there’s anticipation in the air as a whole slice of society hauls itself out to the middle of the Nevada desert for the annual Burning Man festival. I’m not going myself this year, but my good friend Zach Coffin...
This is a followup to yesterday’s post on the visualization of a day’s worth of trading data on the NASDAQ stock exchange. We’ve taken another look at the same dataset a bit more closely. In the examples that follow, each of which represents a single minute of trading, the image on the left uses a...