Stamen Alumni
Over the years we've had the pleasure of working with some of the best in the business, who've since moved on to other ventures. Watch for these names, they're bound to surprise you with what comes next!
Aaron Straup Cope: Design Technologist
Photo by Tom Coates on flickr
Aaron is Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fond. Aaron was a senior engineer at Flickr, focusing on mobile and geo/mapping related tools, before leaving to join Stamen in 2009. Once upon a time, he was still a practicing painter. Aaron does not normally speak in the third person and by all accounts "there's flesh under all that RDF-talk."
Aaron blogs at http://aaronland.info/, posts photos on flickr, presented Buckets and Vessels at Museums and the Web 2010, and is the author of http://prettymaps.stamen.com/.
Ben Cerveny: Advisor
Ben Cerveny is a strategic and conceptual advisor to Stamen, helping to articulate an approach toward creative visualization and to evaluate and develop potential partners and engagements relative to that vision.
Ben is a highly regarded experience designer and conceptual strategist, guiding the creative direction and vision of multiple successful endeavors, both public and private. His clients include Nokia, Sony, and Philips, as well as the Cities of Amsterdam and Barcelona. Previously, he was founder of the Experience Design Lab at frogdesign, an international product design company, and a lead designer and platform development strategist at Ludicorp, makers of Flickr.
Ben is a twelve-year veteran of the interaction design field. His past accomplishments include the design of network media sharing applications at Be Inc. and Silicon Graphics, and the management of the Research and Development group at web services agency Organic. He is the author of a forthcoming book on games as system models, and is a Director of a research foundation focused on investigating the intersection of play, interaction, and urban space.
(photo by Timo Arnall)
Deborah Monaghan: Director of Operations
Originally an East Coaster, Deborah took a degree in English from the University of Rhode Island prior to studying photography, design and advertising at art school. Her life as a roving generalist has included an array of experiences that primed her for life at Stamen: gardener, music promoter, a stint in sales & development and project manager (at unnamed branding firm).
Deborah oversees both the big picture and the day-to-day details of Stamen, from finances to schedules, to studio and project management. Deborah's started working with Stamen in June of 2007 and has been happy ever since.
Jen Rainin: Studio Manager
Mother of two amazing little boys, working actress, and PhD in literacy from the University of Illinois Chicago, Jen is well prepared for her role as Stamen den mother.
Jen is responsible for creating and maintaining an environment where our designers can thrive. She manages the day-to-day finances and operations, reviews schedules and keeps the studio job board current. She also works with the design team to establish internal project goals and ensure smooth workflow. Jen makes Stamen a place we all want to play in every day.
Patrick Dillon: Executive Producer
Patrick Dillon was Stamen’s executive producer from 2010 to 2011, responsible for shaping and managing our long-term aspirations as well as helping drive and sustain our immediate projects. A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, author and editor, and former software executive, he was executive editor California Magazine, and before that he was editor of Forbes ASAP magazine. He also directed web content for Quokka Sports, the digital broadcaster of sporting events, including the Whitbread Round the World yacht race and the Sydney Olympics.
His journalism background includes managing a large metropolitan newsroom—that of the San Jose Mercury News. His columns and essays have appeared in more than 100 newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and Fast Company magazine. He is the author of a satirical novel The Last Best Thing and the non-fiction book Lost at Sea, proclaimed one of the best non-fiction books of 1998. His most recent book “Circle of Greed: The Rise and Fall of The Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to its Knees,” has been nominated jointly by the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs as one of the top business books of 2010. He has consulted for the University of Chicago’s publications and MIT’s “Technology Review.”
He owns a farm in Sonoma County, California, where he grows fruit for local restaurants. He also has worked as an assistant in a prestigious Sonoma County wine cellar and crewed and cooked on a crabbing boat in the Bering Sea.
Sha Hwang: Design Technologist
Born in 1985 into a family of Los Angeles merchants and warlords, Sha found employ in the mercenary armies of Willie Brown's corporate raiders when changes in the local zoning laws prompted the clan to move northward. He has lived in New York, Berkeley, San Francisco, West Lake, Ithaca and other cities, and is the kind of person who turns his peripatetic wanderings into data visualizations.
Sha left engineering to study architecture at UC Berkeley and received his degree in 2007. Always the nerdy architect, Sha did scripting, animation, and design in New York City at IwamotoScott, architecture at MESH and motion graphicsat Brooklyn Digital Foundry.
Sha's visualization of his spending on Mint.com brought him to our attention, and Sha returned to San Francisco to join Stamen in fall 2008. He maintains a weblog at http://postarchitectural.com.
Tomas Apodaca: Interaction Designer
Tomas Apodaca has been building interfaces and visualizations with Stamen since 2004. Before that, he was a cofounder of Angry Monkey, a company that created feature film websites and DVD menus, produced cartoons and a music video, developed prototypes for commercial project management software and spun off a research and consulting firm. Before that, he worked at Organic, where he made games and interactive pieces for that company's many corporate clients. See his personal homepage to learn more.
Tom Carden: Interaction Designer & Engineer
Tom Carden joined Stamen in November 2006. Before that, he wrote passenger flow simulation software for London-based architecture firm YRM and studied for his Masters in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation at University College London. He also has a Bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence with Mathematics from the University of Leeds.
Tom's computer science background has always been balanced with a strong interest in design and visual arts and he is actively involved in the community surrounding the Processing development environment. He was an early participant in OpenStreetMap, a project that aims to create free maps of the world using GPS and aerial photography, and his personal weblog Random Etc. has been a place for thoughts, sketches, interactive maps and visualisations since 2003.