A few months ago I left Stamen after almost 4 awesome years. I planned to review the work we did together here but I've been procrastinating on that for long enough so I thought I'd better post something before it's not news any more.
I already miss working at Stamen but in August, green card in hand, I felt it was time for a change of pace. I'm taking the opportunity to build a start-up with my friend and long-time Stamen collaborator Ben Cerveny. We'll both have a lot more to say about that as it takes shape, but you can stalk us here in the meantime if you want.
While we seek funding for our venture I'm freelancing a little bit, building demos for investors and trying to get exposure to some different ways of working. Stamen has proven there's at least one solid and sustainable business model for beautiful, interactive, dynamic mapping and data visualization. But a successful design service that like has a frenetic pace of work and high turnover of projects which I eventually found frustrating. Despite ongoing and successful efforts to build code libraries (like Modest Maps and Polymaps) I came to feel constrained by the clean-room/from-scratch implications of work-for-hire contracts.
That isn't a deeply serious criticism of Stamen. They continue to deliver amazing work (for clients like Bing, MTV and Nike) and art like Prettymaps and I don't believe their working style is flawed. This change is more about what I've learned about my own working style, my curiosity to explore different ways of working, and perhaps the shiny world-changing opportunities of the Bay Area. So with our start-up we plan to seek out and try other business models (licensing, advertising and more) that will allow us to tackle long term projects and give us space to build up our own tools and apply them across many different domains.
I'm also taking this time to re-immerse myself in the growing culture of creative coding that I came to know through the Processing community. That culture is alive and kicking in projects like ProcessingJS and Cinder and many other initiatives, something everyone involved with Processing should be proud of. At some point in the last few years I picked up deep javascript knowledge, which means I share the excitement about projects like Node and I've been making small contributions in that ecosystem whenever I can. All that javascript seems to have made me a better programmer in general, and while it's early days I'm also picking up C++ again using Modest Maps as my test rig for both OpenFrameworks and Cinder.
It turns out this is quite a bit to get across in a couple of paragraphs and I have to get out of the house to see my accountant... how times change! Despite my continued .co.uk-isms I'll be based in San Francisco for the foreseeable future. If you're here too and you've read this far we should probably be talking more. My email address is 'tom' at this URL, or if we've met before there's LinkedIn and Twitter too.