blog/Process

Here’s the final entry of a week of posts about the maps.stamen.com launch. As the launch of our new maps neared, I created a tool for us to look at how people are using the maps. Pre-Launch To speed up the loading of the maps, we try to pre-cache the map imagery. One problem. The...

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Michal Migurski. This is a follow up post to yesterday’s post about watercolor textures, Tuesday’s about watercolor process, and Monday’s announcing the launch of maps.stamen.com. Terrain Layer has been on my mind since 2008 when I first started to experiment with digital elevation data, but it’s only...

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Geraldine Sarmiento. Following up on Zach’s post from yesterday and Eric’s post on Monday, here’s a peek into my process in creating watercolor textures for watercolor maps. Below is a breakdown of the steps, a mix of the hand and the computer in all: Painting Scanning Making...

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Zach Watson. Yesterday, we announced a trio of new maps on maps.stamen.com — we’ve had a lot of interest in how the watercolor map gets generated, so here’s the play-by-play. We’ll be using a section of London as an example: To begin with, we wanted to capture some of...

maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free. *takes deep breath* There are...

We’ve been working with the smarties and do-gooders at Climate Central for the better part of a year now, designing and programming and planning and rendering and otherwise embiggening the idea of a map that could bring the reality of climate change to people’s doorsteps. As of last week, the project is available athttp://sealevel.climatecentral.org. We...

We keep detailed project blogs for the duration of all our projects, where we post work-in-progress, links to related material, and so forth. We do this both as a way to share with our clients where things are at, but also as a way of maintaining a record of the thinking that went into the...

Last year, we were challenged by Esquire magazine to re-imagine a map of America to depict the country in a new light. That challenge has resulted in our first new work for this year: a piece called WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? You can read Esquire’s article on the project and see the other contributions....

Aaaaaand, we’re back, with another live twitter tracker, this time for MTV’s Spike Awards, being held now in LA. Instead of celebrities, we’re mostly tracking video game titles, and this means we can take a longer, leaner approach to the visuals than we normally can. And so: a full-width approach, with artwork from the games...

It’s been a productive couple of months here at the studio, so much so that it’s been difficult to find the time to blog about projects as they happen. We’ve added some new people, for one thing, and started to really get our hands around the operations side of the business. Which is great — but I’m...