blog/Process

Late last year, Stamen worked with the group WastewaterSCAN to build a new home for the group’s public-facing charts that visualize the data they collect from wastewater treatment plants across the US. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the latest data regarding COVID-19 and other viruses like RSV, you might have noticed that there...

There’s a story behind everything; it’s that special context that flavors your experience when reading your favorite book, poring over your favorite map, or listening to your favorite podcast. At Stamen, we love talking about process, working openly, and, you guessed it, telling stories. We want to share the story behind Pollinate, the Stamen podcast:...

One of the biggest myths about data visualization is that you have to have the “right” kind of data to tell compelling visual stories.  But, when data visualization only focuses on leveraging numerical facts, it becomes inherently limiting in ways that science, research and discovery were never meant to be.  There’s a better way.  Researchers...

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) collect and generate vast amounts of rich data. Those datasets hold power to help NGOs increase their reach by more clearly communicating their mission, vision, and results to a variety of key audiences, including funders, clients, beneficiaries, academics, the media, the public, and employees.  But as any NGO data scientist or communications...

We are happy to share that we have begun work on improving MapLibre Native with technical leadership by Wet Dog Weather and funding from AWS. MapLibre Native is an Open Source SDK for rendering maps on mobile and other devices. We at Stamen rely on map renderers to display the beautiful maps we create for...

Look at this fun thing. You can carve a pumpkin on the globe! I can’t believe it. Isn’t it fun? It is. I am fun.Here are a few more. If you want to be fun too, try it at stamen.github.io/pumpkin. Also what is fun is that your carving is stored in the page URL.  If...

The other day at Stamen we were talking about a recent post by esri’s John Nelson called “Create a Light or Dark Version of Any Map in Two Seconds” using ArcGIS Online Map Viewer. So of course we were wondering how we could do the same for Mapbox GL styles. We often have to design...

At Stamen, we work with clients to improve their interactive cartography experience, frequently building full basemap solutions for large corporations who have very specific needs and exacting standards. Doing so means wrangling complex global data into beautiful, performant maps, controlled by elegantly written stylesheets. Most web maps have a near-endless amount of detail that can...

We are thrilled to share a project we’ve been collaborating with the Social Impact Partnerships and Data for Good teams at Meta on to create a new interactive map tool for their High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) Dataset. The explorer is live at populationexplorer.org and we invite you to explore and play with this phenomenal...

In 2021 Stamen had the pleasure of working on Mapping Historical New York with Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research. The Center came to the table with a large and unique dataset of historical census data for the areas that are now Manhattan and Brooklyn dating back to 1850. Part of what is special about...