"Someone once described what we do as 'Web design that doesn't suck,'" says Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck, with a laugh.
From the looks of his company's growing corporate client list, those in the business of commissioning Web sites agree with him. Stamen, which Rodenbeck founded in San Francisco in 2001, has worked with the likes of Yahoo and Schwab, has an ongoing relationship with BMW's Designworks division, for which they created an internal, online collaboration tool allowing workers to share project information. More recently, they worked with Digg.com, for which they created Digg Labs, making animated images that illustrate what news stories users find interesting.
The Digg Arc element of Digg Labs made its debut last year. The eye-popping app is a dynamic, fresh way of presenting how people consume information online -- and what sorts of news they find most interesting. The title of a story -- for instance, the recent "$4 Gas Makes Hybrids Worth the Money" -- posted on a variety of online sites is centered in the middle of a circle that pops up against a black background. Around the title, in the form of ray-like lines, appear the screen names of readers who "digg," or vote to share, the story. More popular stories have more rays, which appear in vivid hues. The story-sharing is updated constantly, so the arcs grow.
Animated Databases and Crime Maps
It's just one example of Stamen's attempts to nudge Web site visitors to explore data on their own, interactive terms. Rodenbeck calls it "exploratory navigation." The hope is it will encourage users to take an intuitive, adventurous approach to finding information, rather than following a prescribed path.
Shawn Allen, the company's design technologist and another of Stamen's three partners [Michal Migurski, the company's director of technology, is the third], cites a book...

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