Term Paper on Stamen.com

What is Stamen Design and what do they do you ask? Well it was founded by Eric Rodenbeck, a 14-years veteran of the interactive design field, in 2001. Following that Michal Migurski and Shawn Allen joined in partnership wirh Rodenbeck in separate years. So now you know who leads the company, but what do they do. Well to be completely blunt, they work on bring ideas to life. They try to take different ideas and design concepts from imagination and try to actually bring them into reality. The focus on creating interactive design as well as data visualization projects. Over the years, the company has grown not only in staff, but in cliental as well. With this disciplined staff, Stamen Design has increased its cliental over the years to financial institutions, artists and architects, museums, design agencies and many more. A few of the major companies that they have worked with that are easily recognizable are Adobe, BMW, MSNBC, and Yahoo! Let's take a look at a few projects the company was involved in. The three project that we will take a look at are the Mappr application the made for flickr.com, one of the top online photo management web sites, the Yahoo Nikon Stunning Gallery, and finally a framework for Graffiti Archaeology.

Let's start off with the first project, the Mappr application for flickr.com. What does this application do you ask? Well it's very interesting. It gives the viewer and educated guess as to where the location of the picture was taken. What Stamen Design as of late 2004, was start taking images from Flickr and comparing them with images from the UNited States Postal Service database of place names. All of the answers are based on educated guesses because obviously some of the tags in the photos aren't accurate. It places the images on a map of the U.S. for the user. I think it's a fun idea. Not necessarily something that's extremely important but it is certainly a fun idea that will keep its users interested.

The next project I will talk about by Stamen Design is their work for Yahoo!. The the Nikon Stunning Gallery. Nikon Stunning Gallery is an interface that coincides with flickr.com. The Stunning Gallery was to be connected to the new NIkon camera, the Coolpix s6. So any photos that are tagged with "nikonstunninggallery" go into this new dynamic interface which allows the user to do zoom and navigate through these images in this wonderful interface as opposed to just only being able to view the images in their boring internet browser. Very interesting idea from a creative standpoint as well as a marketing one.

"Working with the Stamen guys was like having our own site design SWAT team. They came into a tough, time-critical situation with feet on the ground and were able to parse through the desires of multiple stakeholders and iterative feedback to help us build an incredibly beautiful site. They surpassed all expectations in terms of professionalism, technical skill, and lovely, functional design chops. We look forward to working with them again soon!"

—Kakul Srivastava, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo!

Obviously they do some good work.

The next and final project I am going to discuss is Graffiti Archaeology Project. This project was done by Cassidy Curtis. He has gone around a taken a collection of all the different photos taken of the magnificent graffiti found in San Francisco by different photographers over the years from 1998 to 2009. He is still doing this presently. A lot of the art work is truly phenomenal and really something to behold. What Stamen Design did was create the actual framework for users to view these photos that he has collected over the years. Stamen Design created a way for the users to explore the different parts of San Francisco graffiti over the past decade or so. The application is completely interactive and the colors compliment the actual artwork. It is extremely easy to navigate because it looks like you are looking through a timeline and you can look at different areas in San Francisco as well with just a click of a mouse.

“Anyone who’s looked at all those peeling layers of paint has wondered what’s underneath. And they’ve thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of slide show to show us this space over time?’” said Susan Farrell, founder of the pioneering spray-paint site Art Crimes, which serves up more than 6 GB of street art a day. “But this is the first time it’s been done in any kind of methodical way before.”
—Wired News

Overall I must say that I am really impressed with Stamen Design. I feel like since it started in 1998 it's kind of a revolutionary catalyst for interactive design over the internet. They are very creative with their layouts and framework and they use simple techniques that allow the user to view whatever it is they're viewing with the greatest of ease. You can see in the quotes above how happy their clients are with the work that they have done for them. So do I see this going anywhere else? Absolutely, I can see Stamen Design pushing interactive applications even farther and before you know it we'll be doing things that we never even imagined we could do. With that being said, Stamen Design is a very professional company that has a reliable staff that puts 100% into their creativity as well as making their clients happy.

"Stamen Design." Available at http://www.stamen.com. 19 November 2009.

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