Maps are fascinating things that show us a world that is both deeply personal and excitingly unfamiliar. As professional cartographers, we understand the joy of browsing parts of the world where you’ve never been before, but we also know that the first thing people usually do when they see a map is to find their...
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...
The Max Planck Institute hired Stamen a few years back to create a website to visualize increasingly complex urban transformations due to immigration for a project called Superdiversity. The site we created contains multiple interactive charts of census data to enable better research, analysis, and discussion of this novel phenomenon. Because diversity patterns in cities...
When we started thinking about how to recreate Stamen’s iconic Toner and Terrain raster styles with vector data, Toner seemed like it would present the bigger challenge. Achieving the right hierarchy and visual balance of that style felt like a monumental task to me, an ardent admirer of Toner for many years. Terrain was less...
Not long after Stamen created our first Toner, Watercolor, and Terrain styles, a new technology came along: vector maps. Though it still used the paradigm of dividing up the world into map tiles, vector maps divide up the data into pre-processed chunks instead of the map itself. In vector cartography, the map is drawn dynamically...
Since 2011, Stamen has provided basemaps built upon OpenStreetMap (OSM), but it’s been several years since we updated the underlying data in them. We received a grant from the Knight Foundation a few years after their release to refresh Toner and Terrain, but it’s no small feat to keep a worldwide map updated with the...
As you may have heard, we’ve partnered with Stadia Maps to create updated and modernized versions of our venerable basemap styles on Stadia’s infrastructure. You can read more about the announcement here and learn about some of the amazing features in the new maps in our recent blog post “Here Comes the Future of Stamen...
Since 2011, Stamen has provided free custom-designed basemaps for the whole world, for anyone to use, for any purpose. Long after other map providers went out of business, started requiring API keys, or charging for usage of their maps, we kept providing our maps for free. Why did we keep doing it, years after others...
This week, Stamen will be attending the State of the Map US conference in Richmond, Virginia! We’ve been attending these OpenStreetMap conferences (either the international State of the Map or this US-based version) for over a decade, and it’s always exciting to feel the energy of this lively community of open source mappers. The OpenStreetMap...
