blog/Eric Rodenbeck

Last Friday I had the pleasure of being hosted by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Curators Matilda McQuaid, Andrea Lipps and Cindy Trope at a visit to Cooper Hewitt in New York City. They’ve acquired our watercolor maps into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian! And they’re on display in the galleries. So I called up my...

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...

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...

Mention the term “discovery phase” in a room full of product managers, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, or developers, and you’re certain to garner myriad responses: everything from nods of agreement and appreciation to rolling eyes and exasperated sighs. In fact, in the design and development process of digital products, there’s perhaps no phase that is more...

Acquiring physical art for a museum requires a lot of planning and care. But what does it mean to acquire a digital artifact? You might be surprised to learn it’s less like the acquisition of a painting and more akin to how a zoo acquires a living tiger. In this episode, Andrea Lipps shares some...

In preparation for Earth Day 2023, Stamen Design has been working with our old friend Al Ramadan to make an interactive map of the proposed West Cliff Recreation Area in the city of Santa Cruz, California.

Remote dataviz & maps in the cloud 2022 was our first full year at Stamen being really remote. We’ve been out of our beautiful San Francisco office since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’ve reflected on before, but for the first year or two, we all assumed being remote was temporary. 2021 saw...

One of the biggest myths about data visualization is that you have to have the “right” kind of data to tell compelling visual stories.  But, when data visualization only focuses on leveraging numerical facts, it becomes inherently limiting in ways that science, research and discovery were never meant to be.  There’s a better way.  Researchers...

Researchers are quick to abandon data gaps or anomalies when creating data stories. Learn why digging into missing data helps you tell a more complete story.

We had a great time last month at the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society, talking with old and new friends about a shared love of maps. We also had a record number of team members giving presentations, both about our Stamen work and about some passion projects. We wrote a previous...