Stamen is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001 and in the business of commissioning web sites. They have worked with the likes of Yahoo!, Schwab, and has an ongoing relationship with BMW’s Designworks division, for which they created an internal, online collaboration tool allowing workers to share project information. Recently, they worked with digg.com, for which they created Digg Labs, making animated images that illustrate what news stories users find interesting.

Digg Arc is an eye-catching application that is a dynamic, fresh way of presenting how people consume information online. For example, the title of a story is posted 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” the story. More popular stories have more rays, which appear in vivid hues.

This is one example of Stamen’s attempts to prod web site visitors to explore data on their own. They call it “exploratory navigation.” The hope is that users will be encouraged to take an intuitive approach to finding information, rather than following a prescribed path.

Tags: print industry

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