Five days at the University of New Mexico teaching design & fermentation

| 07.08.21

I was lucky enough to be invited to help teach my pal Janet Abrams’ new design program, Architecture + Design Summer Academy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque last week. I flew(!) in on Sunday, spent a week with Janet and the amazing UNM professor Francisco Uviña helping to shepherd high school students...

Diversity in Design Collaborative Launches to Take Meaningful Action to Increase Diversity in the…

| 06.15.21

Members Join Forces Around Commitment to Improving Representation of Black Creatives in Design, Increasing Design Career Opportunities and Focusing on the Education Pipeline to Create Long Term and Lasting Change Founding members include 2×4, Adobe, Architecture Plus Information, Aruliden, Civilization, COLLINS, Dropbox, Fossil Group, Freeman, fuseproject, Gap Inc., Herman Miller Group, Knoll Inc., Levi Strauss...

New Smithsonian Acquisition: Watercolor Maptiles by Stamen Design

| 05.25.21

[Last week, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum announced that Stamen’s Watercolor map tiles would be added to their permanent collection. As part of that announcement, they released a 5 minute video showing Stamen Design founder Eric Rodenbeck talking about the origins and reception of the Watercolor map. This is post is a brief transcript...

Our Brilliant Friend: Stamen and OpenStreetMap through the years, part 2

| 05.19.21

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...

Stamen’s 12 Sunsets with the Getty Museum wins Webby Award!

| 05.18.21

Stamen’s project 12 Sunsets: Exploring Ed Ruscha’s Archive, which we built in collaboration with The Getty Museum, is the 2021 Webby Award winner in the category of Architecture, Art & Design! The Webby Awards have honored the best websites on the internet every year since the inaugural awards in 1996. This year’s awards ceremony was...

Stamen’s Watercolor map tiles are now in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection!

| 05.18.21

Stamen’s Watercolor map Today the Cooper Hewitt (the Smithsonian Design Museum) officially added Stamen’s OpenStreetMap-based Watercolor map to its collection, the first live website to ever become part of the Smithsonian. Learn more from the Cooper Hewitt press release and the announcement event recorded on YouTube: We are especially grateful to the hundreds of thousands...

A conversation with Harvard GSD’s Charles Waldheim about Ed Ruscha’s archive at the Getty

| 05.11.21

Photo: Austin Liu Stamen recently launched a project with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles about the work of Ed Ruscha, who took hundreds of thousands of photographs of Los Angeles Streets from the back of a pickup truck over fifty years. This enormous archive of urban photographs is in the process of being meticulously...

Our Brilliant Friend: Stamen and OpenStreetMap through the years, part 1

| 05.05.21

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...

Save the date! Stamen & Smithsonian in dialogue about museums & maps

| 05.03.21

Join us on May 18 for a Zoom conversation between @cooperhewitt curator @andrealipps7 + Stamen founder @ericrodenbeck! To RSVP visit the CooperHewitt.org website or go to sta.mn/d85. See you there!

Corona-cartography: what we learned from a year of COVID-19 maps

| 04.12.21

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...