 On a website, a tiny hand clicks on a watercolor map of the world, then searches for Seattle. We zoom in on a hand-painted rendering of the city's street grid. I wanted to embrace the history of cartography as a way of saying it doesn't have to be just straight lines. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Watercolor map tiles by Stamen Design. A light-skinned man with a red beard, Stamen founder and creative director Eric Rodenbeck is backed by a monitor displaying a watercolor map. 2005, when Google Maps first came out, I was terrified. I thought our work was over. That's it, the machines have eaten the market and there's going to be no more mapping work to do. So when this came out, it was widely talked about in the press as an alternative to Google Maps. And then more coagently open street map was seen as the alternative to Google street map for a lot of different reasons. So it was kind of part of that conversation. People don't think about who's making these maps, how they get made or how they get updated or any of that kind of stuff. And it's an incredibly complex, fascinating, multi-layered, continuous, ongoing artifact, technical artifact that is made by robots, it's a collaboration between robots and humans. It's amazing, you know? Watercolor maps are explored. So I didn't want to make a nostalgic gesture, but I did want to call attention to the fact that these maps were being made by people. I really wanted to get this texture of a city to give it almost a hallucinatory quality where you just would pay attention not just to it as a directional device, but as something with composition. But the composition, of course, is made by the world, not by us.