Log Maps

| 03.30.12

Here’s the final entry of a week of posts about the maps.stamen.com launch. As the launch of our new maps neared, I created a tool for us to look at how people are using the maps. Pre-Launch To speed up the loading of the maps, we try to pre-cache the map imagery. One problem. The...

Terrain Process

| 03.29.12

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Michal Migurski. This is a follow up post to yesterday’s post about watercolor textures, Tuesday’s about watercolor process, and Monday’s announcing the launch of maps.stamen.com. Terrain Layer has been on my mind since 2008 when I first started to experiment with digital elevation data, but it’s only...

Watercolor Textures

| 03.28.12

This post was originally published on stamen.com by Geraldine Sarmiento. Following up on Zach’s post from yesterday and Eric’s post on Monday, here’s a peek into my process in creating watercolor textures for watercolor maps. Below is a breakdown of the steps, a mix of the hand and the computer in all: Painting Scanning Making...

Watercolor Process

| 03.26.12

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...

Surging Seas: sea level rise in your community

| 03.19.12

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...

Stamens Out & About

| 02.21.12

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...

Esquire: where the maps come from

| 02.13.12

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...

New Work: The United States of 2012 for Esquire Magazine

| 02.10.12

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....

How we grew in 2011

| 01.30.12

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...

What we did in 2011

| 01.18.12

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...