The reason HuffPost takes on this kind of project, which not every media organization would, is because we believe in the cause and we have a trusted partner in DonorsChoose.org. We don’t just want to raise awareness and leave readers in the lurch, we want to actually have an impact. We want to bridge that gap from awareness to action — which is what Stamen has helped us do with this beautiful map. This project is a really cool combination of vision, purpose, design and impact.

What they do is not just illustration. It's illumination. Working with Eric and his team wasn't just about discovering things I didn't know about my own research, although it certainly was that. I also learned things that I didn't think it was possible to know about my work.

It's been a great pleasure working with Stamen on the interactive wall-mounted maps in the David Rumsey Map Library at Stamen. They came in with a strong design point of view, yet were always very responsive to ideas that my team and I had about how to best work with these gigantic, cutting-edge screens. And their technical expertise ensured that everything went smoothly for the launch of the Library.

We needed to help visitors find a way to enjoy our heavily visited iconic spaces, like Alcatraz, Muir Woods, and the Golden Gate Bridge, without overwhelming them with cars. We asked Stamen Design to help us. And they blew us away.

Stamen helped us to improve our existing data visualizations to allow us to study even more data simultaneously. Additionally, these new visualizations are FAST. This is a common theme in biology—in all science these days really. There’s more data out there, and investigating it requires adding more and more data to your experiments. The enhancements Stamen provided brought new variations and interactions with the data that help users to query the data in a new ways. They allow us to ask bigger and more comprehensive questions of our data than we could before.