Last year we rebuilt our well-loved Stamen basemaps from scratch, re-creating them on a totally new tech stack in partnership with Stadia Maps. This was a bittersweet and challenging process, trying to build new styles that matched the aesthetics of the old maps, while still giving us a fresh start to keep these maps running...
As self-proclaimed map nerds, there’s nothing like a crossover of nerdy subjects to provoke thought and discussion at Stamen. The new season of House of the Dragon premieres this Sunday, June 16 on HBO and Max in the U.S. and we thought this would be the perfect moment to finally talk about cartography in The...
Perhaps you’ve noticed over the past decade how that “once in a century” forest fire or hurricane seems to be appearing in the news more often than its name would imply. With temperatures increasing due to climate change, natural disasters are increasing in both frequency and intensity across the world. In these situations, it’s of...
It’s been a year of ups and downs—quite literally if you’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) like we have. The long-awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild (BotW) was one of the top-rated games to release in 2023 and surpassed the seemingly impossible standard set by its predecessor. Last...
In August 2023, Stamen started working with the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy. The focus of our work was their keystone product, the Distressed Communities Index (DCI) interactive dashboard. The DCI highlights economic disparities in U.S. communities at several geographic levels,...
As we mentioned recently, Stamen worked with Densho in 2023 to create Manzanar CloseUp, a map of the Manzanar concentration camp in California where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Where our previous work on Sites of Shame visualizes all of the camps that existed and the aggregated movement of individuals to and from camps,...
One of our biggest projects last year was an update of our classic basemap styles, working hard with our partners at Stadia to adapt these maps to modern infrastructure and keep them running for years to come. As of October 31, we completed the transition and all our basemap users are now using Stadia’s infrastructure....
Back in 2021, Stamen began working with Densho, a nonprofit committed to documenting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on American soil during WWII. Together, we worked to tell the stories of the 125,000 imprisoned individuals through a map-based visualization called Sites of Shame. In 2023, we collaborated again to develop Manzanar...
