Stamen has been exploring cartography in our own research and with clients like CNN, Zillow, Warner Brothers and Esquire Magazine for over 10 years.

As part of our CityTracking grant from the Knight News Foundation, we released three original map styles to the world under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0) license: Toner, Watercolor and Terrain. We’ve since followed up with a few style variations: Toner-Lines, Toner-Labels, Toner-Lite, Terrain-Lines, Terrain-Labels and Terrain-Background. On August 24, 2012, we also released a fun WebGL experiment called BurningMap, an homage to the Burning Man Arts Festival (that only works well in the Chrome web browser).

There is much more information on the project at the main project site, maps.stamen.com, including information on the CC license, and how to incorporate the maps into your site.

Screenshot of maps.stamen.com, taken August 27, 2012