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All right! It’s 2013 & I have all kinds of new business to report. Back in 2002, when I was first getting serious about Stamen, I got my first real gig: my friend Dane Howard (formerly of Quokka Sports) connected me with some friends of his at DesignworksUSA, who were looking for a way to...

Friends of the internet! In a few days the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body made up of governments around the world, will be meeting in Qatar to re-negotiate International Telecommunications Regulations. These meetings will be held in private and behind closed doors, which many feel runs counter to the open nature of the internet....

By Nathaniel, cross posted from http://kelsocartography.com/ I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Natural Earth 2.0.0! The 2.0.0 release focuses on 7 major areas and is available to download today à la carte at NaturalEarthData. ZIP combo downloads of all vectors: SHP (279 mb) or SQLite (222 mb) or QuickStart kit for ArcMap...

I went to my first Open Street Map conference recently — State of the Map US, in Portland. Stamen was one of the conference sponsors, along with MapBox, and ESRI and TeleNav, among others, and it’s great to see and be part of the different industries come together to support this effort. I went with Mike and...

This is a follow-up post about the piece we launched last week on Facebook Stories called “Data Visualization: Photo-Sharing Explosions.” The project took us a little over 2 weeks from start to finish, and we wanted to show you a bit about how we got to the final piece. The Facebook team asked us to...

Following up on last month’s map of the world’s friendships on Facebook, we’ve released another visualization of relationships across social networks today. Called “Photo-sharing Explosions,” these visualizations look at the different ways that photos shared on George Takei’s Facebook page go viral once he’s posted them. Each visualization is made up of a series of...

A lot of what we do at Stamen is inventing things that haven’t been done before; pushing the technical envelope on something like scary cartography, or inventing new techniques to animate the effects of climate change due to global warming. It’s fun, and it’s definitely a big part of what keeps my creative juices flowing:...

We’ve launched a new project for PMC, a consulting firm that advises municipalities on things like transit policy and energy use. Energy Efficiency in San Gabriel Valley looks at a variety of cities in southern California and reports how much electricity and natural gas people used, how far they drove, how much waste they generated,...

The Map to Image bit of maps.stamen.com has seen steady use since we launched it in September: close to six thousand images made, about half of those watercolor, a third toner, about one every ten minutes. We’ve made some adjustments and improvements to it that should make it even easier to use, and easier to...

Stamen alum Sha Hwang and I shared a stage last night at Arkitektura’s Design Assembly in their lovely Soma showroom. Besides the obvious awesomeness of sharing a stage with Sha (whose work at Trulia is up there with the best), it’s always fun to talk to an audience of designers; their focus on how things...