blog/Read

(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...

Yellow Warbler. Photo: Ben Collier/Audubon Photography Awards Stamen worked with the National Audubon Society to visualize the future of bird species across North America in the face of climate change. Eric Rodenbeck, CEO and creative director of Stamen, sat down to talk with the team to talk about this new work, Survival by Degrees: 389...

To some, Lake Tahoe represents the quintessential winter wonderland — a playground of powdery snow and stunning vistas. Others think of those famously blue waters from a different recreational perspective: a place to sail, swim, and even surf. And still others think of the 2 million year old lake as the ecological treasure lying at the heart...

The last year of the decade gave us plenty of opportunities to work and play with data of all kinds, from governance indices to cloud storage data to a mostly unseen but truly vast archive of “motorized photographs” by Ed Ruscha. As always, it’s the diversity of projects that come through here that I’m most...