The Zachary Watson Memorial Education Fund

| 01.13.15

Last year, our friend and colleague Zachary Watson tragically died by being struck by an automobile at the age of 29, leaving many of us shocked and deeply saddened. In his memory and honor, a few current and former Stamens have set up an education fund. It’s being administered by our friends and neighbors down...

Get a drink of open data with MapIsArt

| 12.16.14

Just in time for your holiday gift buying rush, we’re announcing today a new partnership with MapIsArt. They’re a new company formed to take advantage of the increased availability and accuracy of OpenStreetMap data by offering custom map products based on our watercolor maps. We’re starting off with a couple different custom products: canvas, table...

Introducing Positron & Dark Matter: New Basemap Styles for CartoDB

| 12.01.14

Ready to make lovely maps using open source data on an open source platform? Two new basemap styles — Positron and Dark Matter — are available from mapping platform CartoDB, waiting for you to make your own beautiful visualizations. CartoDB already has a suite of styles to choose from, but some of the ones using OpenStreetMap data were only...

Healthcare Variation: Location, Location, Location

| 11.20.14

This week, the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF), a longtime Stamen client, released a completely redesigned and updated version of All Over the Map, a tool to help policymakers, health professionals, and concerned citizens discover variations in the prevalence of elective procedures across California. Why does such variation matter? Well, it turns out geography matters when...

A Blueprint for Global Water Security: Visualizing Urban Watersheds for The Nature Conservancy by Beth and Dan

| 11.19.14

Few things are more vital to a city than safe, accessible fresh water. More than 20% of the world’s population lives in areas where access to clean, fresh water is challenging. It’s obvious: Healthy cities need reliable clean water to thrive. But how do we achieve that critical goal of safe, secure water supplies for...

The Urbanist: Urban Cartography at SPUR

| 11.13.14

It’s no secret that the field of cartography has been going through some pretty serious change lately, and that a lot of this change is happening because of work being done here in the Bay Area. San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank SPUR has been tracking developments in the field and doing a lot to get...

Notes from 2. Istanbul Tasarim Bienali — Istanbul’s Second Design Biennial

| 11.07.14

Greetings from Berlin. Earlier this week I was in Turkey, where I’d spent the last week coordinating the install of our curation, Mapmaker Manifesto. The second Istanbul Design Biennial opened to the public on November 1. Produced by iKSV, one of Istanbul’s, if not Turkey’s, largest arts foundations, the event worked with over 50 artists,...

Maps -> Istanbul: Announcing Maps and Mappers for the Mapmaker Manifesto Curation

| 10.03.14

This year, the Istanbul Design Biennial has chosen the theme The Future is Not What it Used To Be. When they opened the call for participation back in January, they asked for manifestos of any form — words, videos, artworks, anything that spoke to this theme. So theMapmaker Manifesto was born. This manifesto demands that we look...

Silent Springs, Specifically: Visualizing North American Bird Flight Range Shifts for the Audubon Society by Alan and Beth

| 09.09.14

Climate change, though we know it’s there, is a hard thing to see: it’s slow, it’s invisible, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, then you might not even miss it once its gone. Birds, however, are often hard to miss: they can be loud, bright, beautiful, strange. It turns out that by...

Announcing a new Stamen partner

| 09.03.14

STAMEN DESIGN MAPS OUT EXPANSION FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE FIELD OF DATA VISUALIZATION:NAMES JON CHRISTENSEN AS PARTNER & OPENS NEW OFFICE IN LOS ANGELES;ANNOUNCES GROUNDBREAKING SOCIAL SENSE-MAKING, ENVIRONMENTAL & MASS MEDIA PROJECTS SAN FRANCISCO, CA, September 3, 2014 — Stamen Design, known for award-winning design in the field of data visualization and its beautiful and technologically sophisticated...