Stamen’s Most Excellent Cheerio Maps

IF EDWARD TUFTE GOT HIGH, gobbled down the MLS database, and yawned it back up in Technicolor, the aftermath might look something like Cheerio Maps, Stamen Design’s new experimental visualization of San Francisco home sales.

Cheerio Maps pushes the geospatial cloud of dots concept into psychedelic territory, where tiny points and conservative tints melt to ridiculously-large circles and candy store colors. The result is at once beautiful, jarring, and utilitarian, in strange ways that I can feel but don’t yet completely understand.