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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...

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!

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 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...