blog/Read

Acquiring physical art for a museum requires a lot of planning and care. But what does it mean to acquire a digital artifact? You might be surprised to learn it’s less like the acquisition of a painting and more akin to how a zoo acquires a living tiger. In this episode, Andrea Lipps shares some...

This week, Stamen will be attending the State of the Map US conference in Richmond, Virginia! We’ve been attending these OpenStreetMap conferences (either the international State of the Map or this US-based version) for over a decade, and it’s always exciting to feel the energy of this lively community of open source mappers. The OpenStreetMap...

Making data visual is an incredible tool for communication, but finding the right way to do so is something we are always interested in refining here at Stamen. In our latest episode of Pollinate, Denise Lu digs into what it means to distill complexity for the news cycle, and in this conversation between Stamen’s Nicolette...

If you’ve been following some of our recent posts about maps and gaming, perhaps you’re wondering, what lessons on spatial navigation can we take from game design and apply to navigation in the real world? The answer is that the visuals that accompany the driving directions you get from Google, Apple, Waze or most other...

You can tell a good story with words. But a great story compels an audience through thoughtful visualizations. In this episode, Denise Lu walks us through her career in journalism—from her involvement in a student publication in college to her current role as Senior Graphics Reporter at Bloomberg News. We discuss what makes cartography and...

At Stamen, our appreciation and opinions of maps go beyond just our professional work here and often bleed over into our personal interests as well. Our eye for interactivity, color palettes, contour lines, and labels doesn’t stop once we log off at the end of the day. As we covered in a previous post by...

While you could say that visualizing data is like providing a window into your data, we at Stamen know it’s more like building a door. Sure, data visualization allows you to see some things, but the journey doesn’t really begin until you’ve walked in and figured out where you can go next. And creating these...

In preparation for Earth Day 2023, Stamen Design has been working with our old friend Al Ramadan to make an interactive map of the proposed West Cliff Recreation Area in the city of Santa Cruz, California.

One of the exciting aspects of working at Stamen Design is that we work with all kinds of data. Not only do we get to explore what story the data is telling us, but we also get to explore how to tell it from a technical perspective. A challenging data type for web mapping are...

As we emerge from three years of pandemic, social isolation, and political instability, how do we as humans cope with living in an uncertain world? How do we find joy and connection while acknowledging the inevitability and looming threat of climate change? In this podcast episode, Cartographer Jeffrey Linn introduces us to the concept of...