Facebook Beatquake: What millions of sound waves traveling through Facebook look like

| 05.28.13

Facebook Stories has just released their third visualization project with us, which we’re affectionately calling “Beatquake.” The project is designed to show listening activity across Facebook over the course of 90 days. We were all surprised how popular Thrift Shop by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis is. It blew out most of the investigative charting we...

Facebook: Engineering a Beatquake

| 05.28.13

Today we want to draw back the curtain on our most recent piece for Facebook Stories: Beatquake. More than 110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times through apps integrated with open graph. So what does it look like when a song goes viral on Facebook? Inspired by old-school graphic...

Stamen, Maps, and Brightworks

| 05.04.13

Remember being a kid and daydreaming about what it would be like if school wasn’t just rows of desks and boring classes? What if you could go to a school where, instead of memorizing facts you may never reference again, you learned how to garden, make art, build things (based on math equations!), and work...

Grasses, Watermen & Bathymetry

| 04.22.13

Today we’re announcing a new cartography and storytelling project called Chesapeake Bay Grasses with the Chesapeake Bay Program (CBP), a partnership of federal, state, non-profit organizations and academic institutions dedicated to the protection and restoration of the Bay. Stamen has been working with the CBP to develop a visual story about the health of the...

Found on campus: a Stamen map of Palo Alto in tablecloth form

| 04.17.13

News flash: maps transform from paper things to digital things to things all over the map with maps all over them. We were delighted to receive an invitation to the Stanford Cool Product Expo, a yearly showcase of innovative companies and products produced by Stanford’s MBA students. Stamen was one of 45 producers invited to...

Parklets, private bus networks and open source have more in common than you think

| 04.08.13

Later today, I’ll be joining a panel discussion at SPUR talking about how urban agents are changing our cities, with local design and infrastructure smarties like Raphael Garcia from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission & Nancy Levinson from Design Observer. On my radar: welcome urban innovations like parklets, less-popular (or at least more controversial)...

Pow! Thwok! Happy Monday.

| 04.05.13

Lock Batman, Hulk, Iron Man, Catwoman, a mercenary Snow White and antihero Bilbo Baggins in a room. Make ’em fight. Who wins? Our latest social vote project for MTV’s 2013 Movie Awards gives a realtime window into this virtual bloodbath. Poom! Leading up to the April 14 awards show, fans are casting votes for this...

Announcing here.stamen.com

| 03.27.13

Stamen has been working with 3d data from HERE for a few months now, and it’s time to start being public about that. You can skip to the good stuff by heading over to http://here.stamen.com/ and explore for yourself, or take a look at what follows for some more details & rationale. The Story: Here,...

Questions from Webstock

| 02.14.13

As I’ve done before once or twice, I got excited enough talking about the projects we’ve been working on that I ran a bit over during my talk today and didn’t get to the questions I wanted to ask the lovely audience at Webstock to help me answer. Suddenly there was a “0 minutes left”...

It’s Nice That

| 01.16.13

Nice indeed for our watercolor maps to be included in the It’s Nice That 2012 Annual. It’s even nicer to receive a hard copy of the beautiful Annual in all its glory, and to see our work nestled amongst gorgeous, creative, dynamic work from around the world. There’s always a lot of discussion about the...