Summer of Education!

| 07.16.14

We’ve been quiet about something cooking here at Stamen, in part because it’s new and experimental, and in part because we’ve been so busy doing it that we haven’t made time to write yet. That something is our Education program, run by Beth. It was taking baby steps throughout the spring, and this summer it’s...

Stamen Maps for Tableau

| 07.08.14

Stamen has long aspired to make it easier for people everywhere to visualize data, particularly on and with maps. In our recent partnership with Tableau, we’ve helped to improve a tool that does just that. Tableau’s latest version, 8.2, comes complete with a mapping suite designed by us. Suddenly it’s that much easier for people...

ACA 411: Visualizing Obamacare

| 06.18.14

This year, people across California began getting health insurance coverage in new ways, thanks to President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. As the new marketplaces, subsidies, and penalties got discussed and debated in the media this spring, we at Stamen were hard at work with our frequent client the California Healthcare...

RFPs, Parks, and the Internet

| 06.10.14

Here at Stamen, we’ve been doing more works for and about parks, first our map for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and then our own parks and social media experiment at parks.stamen.com. We love parks! I especially love parks. I spent almost a decade telling stories of local parks and wildlife for Bay Nature...

All the people underwater: new Surging Seas map of California

| 06.10.14

Climate change is one of those things that can be so invisible, and in some cases so subtle, that it can be hard to conceptualize. Over the years, our work with Climate Central has sought to make one symptom of this looming problem — sea level rise — much easier to see. The maps we’ve made together reveal what’s...

Stamen’s Checklist for Maps

| 05.21.14

Recently the fine folks at WIRED’s Map Lab asked for a checklist for maps. We have a list of interaction design-related things we like to ensure across all of our map projects which we thought you might be interested to see. Happy mapping! URLs should contain and maintain state, by default. This feature means that...

Notes from the studio: a pretty damn good week

| 05.20.14

When I first moved to San Francisco from Atlanta a few years ago, the first thing that struck me about the city (aside from the expensive everything) was the pace. People here go so fast, how can they possibly stop and smell the roses? Our speed at Stamen often reflects the pace of this city,...

Stamen + Gray Area Partnering on Creative Code Fellowship + Classes! Apply now for Summer 2014!

| 05.13.14

Today is an exciting one: we’re pleased to announce that Stamen is offering a summer Fellowship! AND we’re doing it in partnership with longtime friends at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, along with Obscura Digital and Helios. This is a real opportunity for someone to come and work with us and Gray Area for...

Mapping the Intersection Between Social Media and Open Spaces in California

| 04.30.14

What happens when you map the social media footprint of the great outdoors? Last month, Stamen launched parks.stamen.com, a project we created in partnership with the Electric Roadrunner Lab, with the goal of revealing the diversity of social media activity that happens inside parks and other open spaces in California. If you haven’t already looked...

OpenStreetMap Spring Editathon

| 04.29.14

Last Saturday Stamen hosted the Bay Area edition of the OpenStreetMap Spring Editathon, one of 10 locations across the country. We had nearly 40 people show up over the course of the day, all of them eager to help contribute to the development of OpenStreetMap, “the Wikipedia of Maps”. At Stamen we use OpenStreetMap data...