Sometimes at Stamen we get the chance to create physical works of data visualization for our clients in the tactile world. Matson recently commissioned us to create an anchoring art piece for the boardroom at their recently redesigned offices in Oakland, CA. You may recognize the name from their logo on the side of shipping containers.

If you haven’t heard of them before, Matson is a leading shipping company founded in San Francisco in 1882 and now headquartered in Honolulu and with operations spanning the Pacific, from Anchorage to Auckland, Shanghai to LA. Matson’s history is pretty fascinating — which includes introducing containerization to the Pacific shipping industry. Hawaii is deeply embedded in the history of the company and for this reason they wanted a piece that communicated its importance, while still showing the full range of Matson’s Pacific network.

What we ended up creating is an 8' x 4' all-white 3D bathymetric map, that places our 50th state smack in the middle. We also decided to do a bit of an unusual crop (sorry Europe, Africa, Antarctica) to focus on Matson’s territory, the Pacific.