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...

Visualizing the pulse of a pandemic: A year of COVID line charts

| 03.25.21

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...

Some Thoughts on Multivariate Maps

| 03.23.21

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...

Visualizing the world’s watersheds for #WorldWaterDay

| 03.22.21

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...

Letter to a young data visualizer

| 03.12.21

(with apologies & in homage to Rainer Maria Rilke and William Burroughs) From time to time I get asked for advice by young people about paths to careers in dataviz. My path to the field started over twenty years ago. There was no Masters of Data Visualization at the New School when I went there,...