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, grouping the population into five quintiles of well-being from prosperous to distressed. The index uses seven socioeconomic characteristics and indicators to generate a distress score between 0 and 100 ..read more

Every once in a while I like to write a blog post outlining what I’ve been up to over the previous few years here at Stamen Design. Last year (2023) I reached a bigger milestone with the studio, having been with the studio for an entire decade. Wow! The Stamen team more or less as I first met them in mid-2013. Admiring the Watercolor map billboard at 14th and Valencia. Most of the time, it feels like the years have flown past in a blink. I still vividly remember those days in 2013 when I first started at Stamen (a company I had admired for years earlier, and referenced in my grad school resear ..read more

Dealing with the occasional 100-year storm or drought are problems farmers have had to deal with for centuries, but what happens when those weather events become the norm? Climate change will test agriculture practices across the globe in ways humans can’t fully predict. Many country’s harvests are already feeling these effects and will continue to see problems with increases in temperature and shifts in rainfall patterns from elevated human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. “We did not expect to see such a fundamental shift… A 20% decrease from current [maize] production levels could have seve ..read more

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 around the world change over time, the app needs to change as well to reflect that.  A Sankey chart from the Superdiversity website Recently, the folks at Max Planck came to us to ask if we’d be able to modularize the app ..read more

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, Manzanar CloseUp zooms into the Manzanar camp and displays data at the individual level. Putting people on the map In order to display data this granular, Densho digitized all of the buildings that existed in the camp and provided individual-level census d ..read more

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. You can read more about how to continue to use our maps here, and there’s an FAQ about the transition here. We’ve blogged about this process before, in particular the design challenges involved in updating our Terrain style to new data, but we haven’t talked as much about our e ..read more

Eric Rodenbeck (ER): Welcome, Alex! I’m excited to talk with you today and showcase you and your work. Let’s start with how you came to be at Stamen. How did we find you? How did you find us? Why are you working here? Alex Parlato (AP): That’s a good question. Well, I had been working at Mapbox for five years and I was hoping to try some new things. I wanted to get closer to design without going back to being a designer. I went to school for design and designed for a time in my career. I moved into software development work and feel most comfortable there. I like being in an organization that ..read more

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.  Sites of Shame allows users to explore and understand the systematic incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 2023, we collaborated again to develop Manzanar CloseUp, an in-depth view of daily life at the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California. Using this too ..read more

We’ve just passed the most prolific time of the year for cartographers: the 30 Day Map Challenge! Every November, cartographers across the globe answer the call to create a map each day with a theme outlined by the organizer Topi Tjukanov. These themes cover everything from continents to data sources to concepts. People often added their own unique spin and interpretation of the theme, making every day of the challenge exciting! While we have yet to participate as a company (there’s always next year right?) we love to see folks creating maps using or inspired by those we make here at Stamen du ..read more

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2023 conference in Pittsburgh was a fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Rodenbeck, and Ross Thorn. I’m developing a history with NACIS, having given my first talk there last year on cartography and the golden ratio, and other Stamens have been giving talks there for some time now. What follows are some of the notes and thoughts from all three of us during this event, which feels like a place where we can come home. Ross’s Presentation: Amazon ..read more