blog/Read

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Zach Watson. Yesterday, we announced a trio of new maps on maps.stamen.com — we’ve had a lot of interest in how the watercolor map gets generated, so here’s the play-by-play. We’ll be using a section of London as an example: To begin with, we wanted to capture some of...

We’ve been working with the smarties and do-gooders at Climate Central for the better part of a year now, designing and programming and planning and rendering and otherwise embiggening the idea of a map that could bring the reality of climate change to people’s doorsteps. As of last week, the project is available athttp://sealevel.climatecentral.org. We...

This past January saw the first meeting of ConvergeSF, which hosts events to explore the intersection of design, art and technology here in San Francisco. Stamen’s resident mathematician, Rachel — (how cool is that?) — presented along with Doug Winnie from Lynda.com. After many years of working in Flash, Stamen has been steadily moving towards a HTML5/JavaScript toolset for...

We keep detailed project blogs for the duration of all our projects, where we post work-in-progress, links to related material, and so forth. We do this both as a way to share with our clients where things are at, but also as a way of maintaining a record of the thinking that went into the...

Last year, we were challenged by Esquire magazine to re-imagine a map of America to depict the country in a new light. That challenge has resulted in our first new work for this year: a piece called WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? You can read Esquire’s article on the project and see the other contributions....

We added six(!) amazing people to our team last year, which brings us up to thirteen. As I’ve got two days left in the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take a crack at welcoming our new collaborators in public. The studio has a longish history of encouraging its members to turn their personal...

This last year was a busy one at the studio; good and full, but often busy enough that we were moving too fast to talk about what we did. Which is a shame, because I’m proud of all of it. Having spent the last week or so getting the screenshots together (and doing a few...

Aaaaaand, we’re back, with another live twitter tracker, this time for MTV’s Spike Awards, being held now in LA. Instead of celebrities, we’re mostly tracking video game titles, and this means we can take a longer, leaner approach to the visuals than we normally can. And so: a full-width approach, with artwork from the games...

It’s been a productive couple of months here at the studio, so much so that it’s been difficult to find the time to blog about projects as they happen. We’ve added some new people, for one thing, and started to really get our hands around the operations side of the business. Which is great — but I’m...

Working closely with Dutch broadcasting heavies VPRO, yesterday we launched Nederland van Boven(“Netherlands from Above”), an interactive map of the Netherlands to accompany the forthcoming broadcast of a series of shows about this fascinating tiny country. As my friend Ben Cerveny is known to say: “New York started gentrifying in the 1970s, but Amsterdam started...