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My friend Tania Ketenjian interviewed Eve Ekman and I about our project with the Dalai Lama, the Atlas of Emotions, the other week for the BBC World Service. You can listen to the episode here (we’re on at 20:35), and what follows is a transcript of that interview. Reviewing the design of the Atlas of...

Earlier this year Robbie Schingler, co-founder of Planet, asked Stamen to design and build a presentation that showed: Which spots on the globe Planet has daily or near-daily coverage of How this daily coverage changes during the year, due to weather and satellite deployment What progress Planet has made and is making towards its mission...

Stamen has been working on data visualization projects for 15 years(!)  –  with nine years of blog posts on our work…scattered across a potpourri of blogging platforms. As of today, all our posts from yesteryear have been migrated over to our Medium publication, Hi.Stamen.com. We hope you’ll enjoy looking back at some of our work...

Or Tangifying the Intangible Just over a year ago I showed up to my first day as a designer at Stamen Design and was asked to distill 30 years of scientific knowledge about human emotion into an interactive visualization that would be presented to the Dalai Lama in a few months time. And then things...

One of the core visualizations in the Atlas of Emotions shows the range of states of each of the 5 emotions (anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment). For example, annoyance, argumentativeness, and fury are all states of anger. But, the states vary quite a bit in terms of their intensity: annoyance is relatively mild, fury...

Our clients demonstrating the state of Enjoyment known as rejoicing As Nicolette Hayes described in Embracing the Abstract in Data Viz, the Atlas of Emotions required us to think and act creatively to visually describe human emotions. Zan narrated the path to our depiction of emotional states in The Shapes of Emotions, and that leads...

Last week I sat down with the amazing Zan Armstrong, who I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with over the last six months. She’s heading out on a world tour, so I wanted to get a sense from her what she’d learned from working with us, how she felt about the projects, and what...

We were in a client meeting yesterday, talking about the way we wanted a new project to be received by the intended audience, and Harold Fisk’s amazing maps of the course of the Mississippi over time came up. Am I the first to notice that this: has basically the same color scheme as Jeff Koons’...

When it comes to making maps online there are many tools available, but they all have one thing in common: Geographic coordinates go in and a two-dimensional image comes out. Converting from geographic coordinates (longitude,latitude) to pixel coordinates is accomplished via a map projection. Most of the tools made for online map making focus on facilitating the navigation...

Last year we got to pay several visits to David Rumsey’s amazing map library in his basement in San Francisco’s Cole Valley. At that time it was the country’s largest collection of maps in private hands. It was the coolest room in the whole damn world. David showing his map of rivers in Asia David...