blog/Process

By Eric Brelsford and Alan McConchie It’s hard to believe that it was only one a month ago when the Ever Given container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. As cartographers, one of our favorite memes from the Ever Given era was the Ever Given Ever Ywhere tool built by Garrett Dash Nelson, that...

We spend a lot of time thinking about the world parceled into meaningful units: political, cultural, physical — you name it and we probably have a system for saying what belongs and what doesn’t. And as cartographers at Stamen, we sometimes have access to data that lets us look at a region from a fresh perspective, showing...

The new Facebook Map (map data © OpenStreetMap) At Stamen, we specialize in cartography and data visualization, helping our clients to communicate with complex data. In particular, we’ve spent almost two decades designing and building interactive web maps using open source tools, such as our popular Watercolor map style using OpenStreetMap data. For the past...

I’m beyond excited to be able to share that we’ve been working with The J Paul Getty Trust on visualizing the extraordinary work of the artist Ed Ruscha and his team on and around Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for the last fifty years. The work is online at http://12sunsets.getty.edu/, is live as of today,...

Relative mobility change across the United States, derived from Facebook data When it comes to slowing the relentless march of Covid-19, data is a powerful tool. Data has helped counties and states and countries track cases and deaths, determine the most effective ways to bend the curve, and see in real time whether actions are...

Stamen’s collaboration with UCSF takes on new urgency in the age of COVID-19. Kelly Morrison wrote the first draft of this post Nine months ago, a team from UCSF School of Medicine Dean’s Office of Population Health and Health Equity led by Dr. Debby Oh, hired us to build an online data visualization tool to...

We spend a lot of time making maps and data visualizations here at Stamen, and we’re pretty public about that. What we’ve been less public about is the time we spend reading maps and data visualizations. Research is a core part of our practice here, so in the spirit of a new decade (when data...

To some, Lake Tahoe represents the quintessential winter wonderland — a playground of powdery snow and stunning vistas. Others think of those famously blue waters from a different recreational perspective: a place to sail, swim, and even surf. And still others think of the 2 million year old lake as the ecological treasure lying at the heart...

An article by Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic about this project is available here. North American birds are in trouble. This was the stark message embedded in the National Audubon Society’s climate report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, which reveals that nearly two-thirds of bird species are imperiled by current climate...

Today (January 22nd) is Treaty Day in the region where I live (the northwest part of Washington State). It marks the day in 1855 when the Point Elliott Treaty was signed between the United States government and the native nations living around the north part of Puget Sound (the central Salish Sea). I talked a...