Notebook

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.

Over the past few years, we developed an interactive archive housing the discography of Ron Carter, one of the most prolific and influential bassists in jazz history. Carter has played a major role in shaping the genre, all the while transcending its bounds through collaboration with artists practicing in all sorts of scenes, formats, and traditions. We worked directly with Mr. Carter and his team (shoutout to Penny and Simone!) to create not only a tool, but an immersive experience that feels faithful to his unique position in a diverse universe of sound. In this series, I reflect on how the project came together, as we got to know Mr. Carter and the joy awaiting any music lover in an exploration of his life’s work.

Before we bid a fond farewell to our intern Livie Jacks, we took some time to sit down and chat about her experience working with us here in the studio this summer. A rising senior at Harvard University focusing her studies on statistics and data science, Livie has been a wonderful addition to the Fathom team over the last few months!

In December 2020, Colorado Mesa University was determined to find a way to hold their graduation ceremony in person. With only two weeks to build and design a solution, we teamed up with the university and our collaborators at the Broad Institute to help make an in person commencement possible for graduates and their families at a time when many colleges and universities were still operating remotely.

Recently, we had the pleasure of touring the National Braille Press (NBP), the premier braille publisher in the US specializing in producing original braille works written by blind authors expressly for blind people. I came across the NBP when I was looking for local opportunities to get involved with disability organizations, and a tour at the facility here was a perfect way for the whole team to spend some time together, learning and exploring outside of the office.

When presented with an overwhelming amount of information, how can we understand what’s actually important? Since the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, researchers who have been examining the genome of the virus across its many variants have been both helped and hindered by the unprecedented amount of data that has been collected on the disease. As part of our ongoing effort to create a suite of tools for working with SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data, we saw the challenge of the ever-shifting nature of the virus as an opportunity to help our collaborators hone in on the most relevant mutations when presented with a new lineage.

What does a world look like in which pathogens are as trackable as rain or shine? How can we better understand our relationship to the diseases that circulate around us over the course of days, months, and seasons? Over the past few months at the office, we’ve been undertaking a speculative exercise around the concept of “pathogen weather” to look at exactly that.

In this speculative exercise, also known as “Pathogen Weather” around the office, we considered the kinds of information that would be useful for a speculative society proactive about disease prevention — imagine we were as attuned to the waves of RSV as we are with the changing seasons.