Stamen is a data visualization design studio based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. Its clients include National Geographic, Facebook and The Dalai Lama.

History

Stamen was founded in 2001 by Eric Rodenbeck. In 2003, Michal Migurski joined Stamen as a partner, remaining until 2013. In 2006, Shawn Allen became the studio's third partner, remaining until 2014. In 2014, writer and

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

professor Jon Allan Christensen joined Stamen as a partner and strategic advisor.

Projects

In 2017 Stamen was commissioned by the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

to design and develop Big Glass Microphone, an interactive, online visualization of the acoustic vibrations picked up by a fiber-optic cable buried beneath a road at Stanford University. In 2016 Stamen designed an Atlas of Human Emotions for

Paul Ekman Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of ...

and

The Dalai Lama , coatofarms = , coatofarms_article = , coatofarms_link = , incumbent = Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama , incumbentsince = 22 February 1940 , image = Dalailama1 20121014 4639.jpg , caption = Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama , first = Ge ...

. The

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

quoted

as saying “It is a visualization for what we think has been learned from scientific studies. It’s a transformative process, a work of explanation.” In 2015 Stamen partnered with Hipcamp and GreenInfo Network to develop CaliParks, a bilingual, statewide, parks search engine that brings together park boundary and management data in California with social media content from Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare. Stamen is the developer and maintainer of Field Papers, an open source tool for humanitarian mapping that lets users annotate

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

in areas without internet connectivity. Field Papers was supported by grants from

USAID The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government that is primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $27 bi ...

and the

Hewlett Foundation The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, commonly known as the Hewlett Foundation, is a private foundation, established by Hewlett-Packard cofounder William Redington Hewlett and his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett in 1966. The Hewlett Foundation aw ...

in conjunction with the

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

. In 2014 Stamen designed new default basemaps for

CartoDB CARTO (formerly CartoDB) is a software as a service (SaaS) cloud computing platform that provides GIS, web mapping, and spatial data science tools. The company is positioned as a Location Intelligence platform due to tools with an aptitude for dat ...

, using

data. These map tiles are available for unlimited use under the

Creative Commons Attribution A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

license.

Awards and grants

In 2017 Stamen won the

National Design Award The American National Design Awards, founded in 2000, are funded and awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New Y ...

for

Interaction Design Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) produ ...

, presented by

Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the wing of the Smithsonian Ins ...

. At the Information is Beautiful Awards in 2012, Stamen won the Gold Award for Data Journalism and the Most Beautiful award for its "Home & Away" project for

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

. In that year Stamen also won the ''Information is Beautiful'' "Best Studio" prize. In 2010, Stamen was awarded a US$400,000 grant from the

Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also known as the Knight Foundation, is an American non-profit foundation that provides grants for journalism, communities, and the arts. The organization was founded as the Knight Memorial Education ...

to create a series of freely-available web maps based on

data. The resulting map tiles (called Toner, Watercolor, and Terrain) are available for unlimited use under the

license and are compatible with open source mapping libraries such as Leaflet and

OpenLayers OpenLayers is an open-source (provided under the 2-clause BSD License) JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers as slippy maps. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and Bin ...

. The service is widely used in mapping projects around the world. In 2021, "Watercolor" joined the

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the wing of the Smithsonian Inst ...

collection, becoming the first live website to do so.

Notable alumni

* Rachel Binx *

Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso , nickname = {{Plainlist, * Nat * Nate , footnotes = Nathaniel is an English variant of the biblical Greek name Nathanael. People with the name Nathaniel * Nathaniel Archibald (1952–2018), American basketball player * Nate ...

George Oates George Oates (birth name Georgina Oates, born 1973) is an Australian-born designer and entrepreneur, best known for being the first designer of the photo-sharing website Flickr and for creating the Flickr Commons program. Since 2007 she has worke ...

References

* * * * * * * * * {{cite news , last = Dickey , first = Megan Rose , date = October 12, 2012 , title = Here's A Map To Silicon Valley's Cushy Private Buses , url = http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-private-buses-2012-10 , newspaper = Business Insider , access-date = October 23, 2015

External links