blog/Data Visualization

Pollinate Ep. 18- Denise Lu & Telling Stories With Maps

| 05.11.23

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...

The charismatic megafauna of climate change maps

In the latest episode of the Stamen Pollinate podcast, Stephanie May talked with cartographer Jeffrey Linn about his fascinating series of sea level rise maps and about the concept of “speculative cartography”. Maps that show familiar coastal cities flooded by water are viscerally terrifying and visually compelling, but as cartographers we often struggle with the...

Data Visualization for Education: When Asking Questions is the Answer

| 04.26.23

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...

Making a snappy raster map with shaders

| 04.18.23

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...

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...