Visually stunning and technically sophisticated digital maps. Every stage — from requirements definition through implementation, deployment, and ongoing tile-rendering infrastructure. Our oldest service, our deepest craft.
Three open-source basemap styles, all designed at Stamen, all in regular production use by newsrooms, civic-tech projects, and Fortune 100 products. Our Watercolor style joined the Cooper Hewitt permanent collection in 2021 — the first live website to do so.
From-scratch basemaps tuned to your brand and use-case. Vector-tile production-ready.
Tile servers, CDN setup, refresh pipelines. We've built infrastructure that serves billions of tiles per month.
Pan, zoom, layers, filters, search. Every interaction defensible, every fallback intentional.
OSM extracts, raster processing, vector pipeline, geocoding. The unglamorous part that decides quality.
We publish what we can — TileMill, Field Papers, the Toner style. Our GitHub is part of the deliverable.
2-day in-studio intensives for your team. Private and public workshops.
What's the map for? What zooms, what audience, what device?
Color palette, typography, symbol system. Tested against your worst-case data.
Render the tiles. Iterate on zoom levels. Stress-test legibility.
Build the interactive shell. Pan, zoom, layers, search.
Tile servers, CDN, refresh pipelines. Production-grade ops.
Ship it. Iterate on real traffic. Optional ongoing maintenance contract.
Full design refresh of Amazon's global basemap tiles, shipped 2023, refined 2024 for legibility at every zoom.
Case study
A choropleth-driven interactive atlas of California health outcomes. Researcher-grade methodology, journalist-grade UX.
Case studyThe first live website to enter the Cooper Hewitt permanent collection. A 14-year-old map style still in production use.
Case studyToner. Watercolor. Terrain. TileMill. Field Papers. Tributary. Every line of code we can give back, we give back.
| Project | Year | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Toner basemap | 2010 → | Production |
| Watercolor basemap | 2012 → | Cooper Hewitt |
| Terrain basemap | 2013 → | Production |
| TileMill | 2010 → | Archived (replaced) |
| Field Papers | 2013 → | Production |
"Utility and beauty share an equal footing. They don't compete with one another — they support each other."
Eric Rodenbeck · Founder
25 years of cartography craft. Every project carries founder-level attention.