blog/Roundups

Remote dataviz & maps in the cloud 2022 was our first full year at Stamen being really remote. We’ve been out of our beautiful San Francisco office since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’ve reflected on before, but for the first year or two, we all assumed being remote was temporary. 2021 saw...

Every year in November, cartographers around the world take part in the 30 Day Map Challenge, spending their free time creating a new map each day, working through a list of different prompts posted by organizer Topi Tjukanov, and sharing their maps on social media at the #30DayMapChallenge hashtag.  This year, watching the stream of...

In July 2015, after my first two years at Stamen, I wrote a blog post called “Year Two at Stamen”, and followed it up in December 2018 with another post “Year Five at Stamen”. Now that I’ve hit eight years at my dream job, it’s time to look back at what else has happened since...

A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie, Eric Rodenbeck, and the Stamen Design team Recap In part one of this series, we covered the early years of the friendship between Stamen Design and OpenStreetMap. Like Bert and Ernie, Romy and Michele, or Turner and Hooch, these two...

A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie, Eric Rodenbeck, and the Stamen Design team Stamen and OpenStreetMap, growing up together on the mean streets of Napoli Last month, we were interviewed by Steven Feldman for The Geomob Podcast about Stamen’s history using OpenStreetMap (OSM). This stimulating conversation...

In our last post looking back at the data visualization trends of the coronavirus pandemic, we focused mainly on charts and diagrams, and less on maps and cartography. By and large, the maps of the pandemic were predictable and familiar choropleths and proportional dot maps that did their jobs well and didn’t call attention to...

Visualizing the pulse of a pandemic: A year of COVID line charts You asked, we answered: The @FinancialTimes coronavirus death & case trajectory trackers are now 🔥 FREE TO READ 🔥 outside the paywall: https://t.co/JxVd2cG7KI In this morning’s update, the US has gone above 470 deaths, bringing it just behind where Iran was at the...

Showing multiple variables on a map is an age old challenge in data visualization and cartography. Here we review this design space. This investigation began as a personal curiosity, and expanded to a quest to find the solution to what appears to be an unsolved problem in data visualization — how to calculate the color that one...

Whoa. Stamen HQ, quiet as cats When the lockdowns happened back in March 2020, we all started realizing that we weren’t going to be gathering together at Stamen HQ any time soon, and things got, well, weird. I love working at Stamen, and I think I speak for the rest of my team when I...

[Also posted on Fast Company as “We design maps for a living. Here’s who got the 2020 election right”] Every election season, maps and charts take center stage on major news outlets and across social media. The public is hungry for numbers and understanding, and data visualizers and cartographers race to produce their best work...