I’m thrilled to announce that Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has invited me to teach a second semester long workshop! It’s called Re-imagining the Archive, and we’ll be engaging with the holdings of prominent institutions like MoMA and Harvard Art Museums to investigate the intersection of culture, technology and society. We recently published a “studio”...
Today we’re excited to announce that Stamen worked with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to release a map of dioceses and other administrative regions in the US. The map is the first official and freely accessible interactive map of Catholic dioceses in the US. In the Latin Rite, dioceses are the building...
We’ve made a lot of dark maps over the years at Stamen. We’ll often see dark maps from other designers or commercial providers and think, “why so dark?” We have a philosophy around designing a dark map for a particular client or use case, but we haven’t ever really spelled it out – either internally...
Dark greetings! We’ve been thinking a lot about dark maps in recent months (as Kelsey presented about recently at NACIS) and the thought occurred to us: how quickly could we make a nice dark mode version of Stamen’s iconic Toner style? As you may recall, a couple years ago we created vectorized versions of our...
Why use a map? Imagine a map of your hometown. Seeing that a creek runs along main street or that there are connecting side streets running adjacent to that one highway with the notorious stoplight is the kind of spatial information that could meaningfully impact your life. Now imagine a map of a town you’ve...
This summer I had the honor of speaking at DATA | ART, an event at MIT and sponsored by MetaLab at Harvard and Northeastern University, that gathers practitioners who live in the liminal space between “what is data” and “what becomes art.” The conversation often revolves around the tension between precision and poetry, between representation...
Last month, I led an interactive workshop at The Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Summer Symposium at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. MW CASC is a consortium of research-focused academic, Tribal, and non-profit partners working collaboratively with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The workshop focused on data visualization and mapping for...
Earlier this summer, Stamen collaborated with the team at MetroMatch to update the look and feel of their transit-first navigation tool. MetroMatch is a transit-focused travel planning and discovery site that connects travelers to destinations that are only a short walk from rail stations. MetroMatch’s pilot focuses on Washington, DC, taking advantage of the region’s...
A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie and the Stamen Design team Recap Back in 2021, we wrote a two-part blog post about the history of Stamen Design and OpenStreetMap (“OSM” for short), and the twists and turns of Stamen’s close relationship with the OSM project over...
The State of the Map US (SOTMUS) 2025 conference in Boston, MA was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Brelsford, and Eric Rodenbeck. We presented two talks on Stamen projects related to open source tooling with maps. Now that we’re back in...