Stamen Design

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Cartographic Design + Development Workflow Census

Stamen is working on a small research project about the existing map design and development tooling landscape in advance of a talk we’re planning for State of the Map US in Madison, WI. We're interested in hearing from folks across the mapping community about what tools they use, where there are gaps, and how workflows could be improved in the future. This data will be anonymized before anything is shared outside of Stamen. Any question not marked with an asterisk is optional. We're accepting

Stamen

Our Brilliant Friend: Stamen and OpenStreetMap through the years, part 3 | Stamen

A personal history of OpenStreetMap, seen through the eyes of Stamen Design by Alan McConchie and the Stamen Design team Recap Back in 2021, we wrote a two-part blog post about the history of Stamen Design and OpenStreetMap (“OSM” for short), and the twists and turns of Stamen’s close relationship with the OSM project over...

Stamen

Navigate your city car-free with MetroMatch | Stamen

Earlier this summer, Stamen collaborated with the team at MetroMatch to update the look and feel of their transit-first navigation tool.  MetroMatch is a transit-focused travel planning and discovery site that connects travelers to destinations that are only a short walk from rail stations. MetroMatch’s pilot focuses on Washington, DC, taking advantage of the region’s...

Stamen

Stamen’s Dark (Map) Materials | Stamen

We’ve made a lot of dark maps over the years at Stamen. We’ll often see dark maps from other designers or commercial providers and think, “why so dark?” We have a philosophy around designing a dark map for a particular client or use case, but we haven’t ever really spelled it out – either internally...

Stamen

What We Map in the Shadows | Stamen

Dark greetings! We’ve been thinking a lot about dark maps in recent months (as Kelsey presented about recently at NACIS) and the thought occurred to us: how quickly could we make a nice dark mode version of Stamen’s iconic Toner style?  As you may recall, a couple years ago we created vectorized versions of our...

getty.edu

Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles

In 1966, Ed Ruscha drove a car rigged with a motorized camera to capture Los Angeles’ most iconic street: Sunset Boulevard. He created a time capsule of its famed facades, beginning a sixty-year-long commitment to documenting the changing urban landscape of postwar Los Angeles. The Streets of Los Angeles project that comprises these photographs is likely the most comprehensive artistic record of any city, with over 900,000 images of major thoroughfares. Ruscha’s photographs constitute an unparal

NACIS.ORG

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) is an enjoyable society of map enthusiasts. We have yearly meetings, an online discussion forum, and we work on a variety of projects and publications which promote good map making. We hope you’ll drop by and be a part of our collegial community.

Stamen

Data visualization and mapping for a scientific audience with USGS Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Summer Symposium | Stamen

Last month, I led an interactive workshop at The Midwest Climate Adaptation Science Center’s Summer Symposium at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. MW CASC is a consortium of research-focused academic, Tribal, and non-profit partners working collaboratively with the United States Geological Survey (USGS).  The workshop focused on data visualization and mapping for...

Stamen

Brain Cartography: Mapping a place that everyone knows, but (almost) no one has ever been | Stamen

Why use a map? Imagine a map of your hometown. Seeing that a creek runs along main street or that there are connecting side streets running adjacent to that one highway with the notorious stoplight is the kind of spatial information that could meaningfully impact your life. Now imagine a map of a town you’ve...

Harvard Graduate School of Design

Re-Imagining the archive

Re-imagining the Archive is a Studio Report from the Spring 2025 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design based on the open

map stack stack

Stamen

Exploring the ecclesiastical map of the Catholic Church in the US | Stamen

Today we’re excited to announce that Stamen worked with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to release a map of dioceses and other administrative regions in the US. The map is the first official and freely accessible interactive map of Catholic dioceses in the US.  In the Latin Rite, dioceses are the building...

Stamen

Stamen at State of the Map US 2025 | Stamen

The State of the Map US (SOTMUS) 2025 conference in Boston, MA was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Brelsford, and Eric Rodenbeck. We presented two talks on Stamen projects related to open source tooling with maps. Now that we’re back in...

Spotify for Creators

BONUS- RJ Andrews & The Work Behind the Books by Pollinate

In this short bonus episode, data storyteller RJ Andrews discusses the milestones of the "Information Graphic Visionaries" book series about pioneers in data visualization.

Spotify for Creators

13- RJ Andrews & The History of Information Graphics by Pollinate

The field of data visualization and information mapping has historical roots that date back far earlier than most people would imagine. Micronesian explorers created navigation charts with sticks and shells for thousands of years before the introduction of electronic navigation technology. Hundreds of years ago, humans had the means to mechanically collect data on everything from the pulse of ocean tides to the pulse of a living heartbeat. Data storyteller RJ Andrews is on a mission to showcase

Stamen

Two upcoming workshops at Harvard GSD | Stamen

I’m thrilled to announce that Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has invited me to teach a second semester long workshop! It’s called Re-imagining the Archive, and we’ll be engaging with the holdings of prominent institutions like MoMA and Harvard Art Museums to investigate the intersection of culture, technology and society. We recently published a “studio”...

Google Docs

Cartographic Design + Development Workflow Census

Stamen is working on a small research project about the existing map design and development tooling landscape in advance of a talk we’re planning for State of the Map US in Madison, WI. We're interested in hearing from folks across the mapping community about what tools they use, where there are gaps, and how workflows could be improved in the future. This data will be anonymized before anything is shared outside of Stamen. Any question not marked with an asterisk is optional. We're accepting