For 20 years, Stamen Design has been part of a thriving data visualization and cartography community. We are happy to give back to that community through our open source maps and tooling.
As part of our cartographic work, the Stamen team has developed a suite of open source cartography tools that we use every day to create beautiful, high-quality maps. On the map itself, many of our projects use OpenStreetMap data as a foundation to support a variety of map designs.
Open source cartographic tooling ➤
In recent years, Stamen has developed and maintained a suite of cartography tools on Github, which encompass open source code for generating map styles and utilities for working with cartographic data. These tools leverage existing needs and software to make cartographic work faster, easier, and more collaborative.
Custom Stamen map styles ➤
In 2023, Stamen refreshed and updated our basemaps in partnership with Stadia Maps. This new platform based on modern standards like vector tiles will continue supporting our map users for years into the future. Stamen’s iconic Toner and Terrain styles are available to use via Stadia.
Watercolor ➤
Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, Watercolor utilizes raster effect area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm pop to any map. Inspired by the Bicycle Portraits project, Watercolor was acquired by the Smithsonian in 2021 and was the first live website to become part of the Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection.
OpenStreetMap community ➤
Many of Stamen’s basemap projects use OpenStreetMap (OSM) data as a foundation to explore a variety of map designs through publicly available map tiles. These map tiles were launched in 2011 and have been used hundreds of millions of times by people around the world. Stamen also originated the Field Papers project, which is now hosted by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.