Notebook
Here's where we post periodic updates on what we've been up to at Fathom. Reflections on the interesting stories that emerge from our client work, side projects, after-hours rabbitholes, and other miscellaneous threads of inquiry.
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After spending much of the last two years working away on some behind-the-scenes projects, 2024 became a Year of Big Announcements. We love sharing our work with the community we’ve built over the last decade+, and finally getting to talk publicly about work we’re extremely proud of has been a highlight of our year.
Delphy aims to lower technical barriers to phylogenetic research.
Taking a personal approach to understanding and implementing accessibility.
Why do we work with data?
What’s the best way to learn about a dataset?
Why is it usually so difficult to work with data tools?
What’s the best way to learn about a dataset?
Why is it usually so difficult to work with data tools?
Join Elissa for a day in the life of her commute to the Fathom office!
Andy talks through the process of reviving our studio's 3D printer to make a set of map slices.
Fathom had a very busy - but exciting! - 2023. Though a handful of yet-to-be-announced projects have been taking up the bulk of our time lately, we were lucky enough to close out the year with the full team together in person in our Boston studio.
In part 2 of this series, I discussed the ‘philosophy of a poster’ which generally enframed our approach to designing a mobile-first interface for exploring Ron Carter’s discography. Our app presents all 1,000+ releases in an organic, intuitive landscape, catered to the serendipitous nature of how we experience his music. Like a good poster, it makes careful use of visual hierarchy to help guide a viewer through detailed information while leaving plenty of room for chance. Now that we’ve discussed the ideas driving our nonlinear approach to presenting the collection, let’s talk about how we tie everything back to Mr. Carter.
Even when we’re not literally making a poster, the philosophy of the poster can still apply — and in the case of our Ron Carter Universe project, it very much did. What is the Philosophy of the Poster, you ask? Many designers have written about it, but here’s my shot: A good poster is both an ambient presence in a room, and a tool for organizing information into something useful, depending on who its occupants are and where they stand. Data blurs into texture that welcomes wandering eyes, guiding them closer and through a reading experience where written facts mingle with the viewer’s imagination. A poster doesn’t spell out stories like a book does, but orders and paces the appearance of characters and events (”data”) with a visual hierarchy that leaves room for chance, in all its clarity. This balance of curation and ambiguity enables any number of narratives to emerge around a poster’s layers of legibility.