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This episode of Pollinate introduces some of our recent client work with Columbia University's Center for Spatial Research. A conversation between three members of the project team provides a deep dive into the ins and outs of using modern technology to create a historical experience centered around 100+ year old data. Dan Miller worked with Stamen’s Nicolette Hayes and Eric Brelsford to turn New York City census data from 1850, 1880 and 1910 into a fully explorable interface with enough curation and guidance to tell some meaningful stories.

While there’s beauty in the act of observing the world, there’s more than a little artistry in the practice of deciphering and communicating it. In this episode, Catalina Perez, information designer and longtime Stamen collaborator, talks about her transition from teacher and architect to interdisciplinary designer and how she's carried her passion for explaining things into crafting visual communications.

Combining scientific research with spiritual illumination is hard work. But when you're presented with an idea for a map of emotions by some of the world's top emotion researchers and the Dalai Lama himself, you rise to the challenge. In our inaugural episode, Stamen founder Eric Rodenbeck discusses the difficulties and breakthroughs of bringing such a task to fruition and his personal and professional journey leading up to the creation of the Atlas of Emotions.

When we’re rapidly iterating on creative map designs at Stamen, one source of friction is testing new map icons in a live map. Designers often have to resort to mock-ups of marker designs on a static map, which makes it hard to see how the icons really perform. Or we go through manual steps each...

Last November, as part of Stamen’s 2020 roundup of presidential election maps (“We design maps for a living. Here’s who got the 2020 election right“) published in Fast Company, I sketched out the idea for a new kind of election map which I hadn’t seen implemented before. The map shows a colored ring for each...

In July 2015, after my first two years at Stamen, I wrote a blog post called “Year Two at Stamen”, and followed it up in December 2018 with another post “Year Five at Stamen”. Now that I’ve hit eight years at my dream job, it’s time to look back at what else has happened since...

I was lucky enough to be invited to help teach my pal Janet Abrams’ new design program, Architecture + Design Summer Academy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque last week. I flew(!) in on Sunday, spent a week with Janet and the amazing UNM professor Francisco Uviña helping to shepherd high school students...

Members Join Forces Around Commitment to Improving Representation of Black Creatives in Design, Increasing Design Career Opportunities and Focusing on the Education Pipeline to Create Long Term and Lasting Change Founding members include 2×4, Adobe, Architecture Plus Information, Aruliden, Civilization, COLLINS, Dropbox, Fossil Group, Freeman, fuseproject, Gap Inc., Herman Miller Group, Knoll Inc., Levi Strauss...

[Last week, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum announced that Stamen’s Watercolor map tiles would be added to their permanent collection. As part of that announcement, they released a 5 minute video showing Stamen Design founder Eric Rodenbeck talking about the origins and reception of the Watercolor map. This is post is a brief transcript...

A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie, Eric Rodenbeck, and the Stamen Design team Recap In part one of this series, we covered the early years of the friendship between Stamen Design and OpenStreetMap. Like Bert and Ernie, Romy and Michele, or Turner and Hooch, these two...