blog/Read

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...

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...

(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,...

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...

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...

Dataviz is clearly having a moment in the COVID-19 and social justice crisis — perhaps a definitive moment. Every time I turn around I see another chart, set of small multiples, dashboard. Some of them are great, some of them are just so-so, and some of them are actively dangerous, just like any other form of expression...

The Berggruen Institute came to Stamen with the goal of bringing a fascinating global dataset to life: its Governance Index, which offers important insights into what makes a good government. The Index explores the relationship between democratic feedback, government competence, and the provision of public goods as measures of a good government. Over six years...

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...