blog/Client work

Dreamy, aspirational cartography with Spherical

| 08.10.23

Earlier this year, Stamen collaborated to design a custom branded basemap with our friends at Spherical, a creative technology design and integrative research studio supporting projects regenerating the health and integrity of Earth’s living systems. In partnership with ARLA, Spherical supports community workshop facilitators with their Living Infrastructure Field Kit, a space to explore the...

The Data Visualization Discovery Phase Made Clear, Clear, Clear, in Business Language!

| 06.12.23

Mention the term “discovery phase” in a room full of product managers, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, or developers, and you’re certain to garner myriad responses: everything from nods of agreement and appreciation to rolling eyes and exasperated sighs. In fact, in the design and development process of digital products, there’s perhaps no phase that is more...

Data storytelling with respect for your audience

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...

Level Up Your Navigation: Inside Stamen Design’s Route Simulator

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...

Weaving together plants and people: developing a touchscreen installation for the Exploratorium

| 04.04.23

¡Plantásticas! is now open at the Exploratorium! This exhibit introduces visitors to the world of plants through a diversity of perspectives, and features an installation by Stamen design. The Exploratorium came to Stamen with two rich sets of data: the lived experience of plants through the eyes of Latinx and Indigenous communities, and high resolution...

Connecting the Dots: How Data Products and Design Help Address Systemic Threats

The myriad and complex challenges of addressing climate change can feel overwhelming, but when you combine the wealth and power of data available with communication strategies, it becomes possible to imagine a future where we are valuing conservation, relying on renewables, promoting efficient industrial, consumer, and agricultural processes, and not pumping greenhouse gasses and pollutants...

Visualizing critical disaster data with ReadyMapper

| 03.08.23

With climate-related natural disasters on the rise, it has become increasingly obvious that we lack the tools to provide useful information as crises unfold—the venn diagram of crucial data and real-time communication has painfully little overlap. Since early 2022, Stamen has had the pleasure of working with CrisisReady and Direct Relief to create ReadyMapper, an...

Data Hierarchy Best Practices to Elevate Your Data Visualizations

| 03.02.23

At its very core, data visualization has two main components: representation and interaction.

2022!

| 02.22.23

Remote dataviz & maps in the cloud 2022 was our first full year at Stamen being really remote. We’ve been out of our beautiful San Francisco office since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’ve reflected on before, but for the first year or two, we all assumed being remote was temporary. 2021 saw...

Down In the Sewers Tracking Viruses with WastewaterSCAN

| 02.16.23

Late last year, Stamen worked with the group WastewaterSCAN to build a new home for the group’s public-facing charts that visualize the data they collect from wastewater treatment plants across the US. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the latest data regarding COVID-19 and other viruses like RSV, you might have noticed that there...