After a decade-long run, we've decided to shut down the “3rd Floor” shop. Originally named after the room that had housed our printed material and shipping supplies at 214 Cambridge Street, we continued shipping everything from a portrait of the collaborations of Miles Davis to a visual inventory of Wikipedia.
This was originally intended to be a spring 2021 e-mail, which became a summer update, then it was gonna be “goodbye to our intern” in August, then part of it was spun out as its own post in October. Finally it was gonna wrap up the year and now… here we are to kick off 2022! (On the 25th day of January.)
For years, Pardis Sabeti has tried to get funding to build the necessary tools to mitigate the “next pandemic.” On the front lines of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, she saw firsthand all the ways in which institutions and infrastructure broke down. Most simply, the time to act is not during a crisis — when people are frightened, institutions are stressed, and the day-to-day is itself exhausting. The results are predictable: a haphazard response, money suddenly flowing to all the wrong places, and substantial inequities where the vulnerable become only more so.
Since the invention of the transistor, we’ve been living in the Information Age. Which sounds a bit like we’re enjoying a sci-fi utopia but mostly means that we all have 20,000 unread messages in our Gmail inboxes.
In the last decade, we’ve waded through lots of talk about data—and worse, Big Data—as a kind of frightening “other.” Bruce Schneier described data as “the exhaust of the information age,” which is perfectly apt—but this is usually read the wrong way, giving us an excuse to treat data as a kind of artificial nuisance. We’re led to see data as an abstract, inhuman thing stored in the cloud, or maybe just in the computer.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making prototypes depicting entities and relationships in large sets of documents. Separately, we found ourselves reading more than we’d like to admit of the 312 page testimony of Glenn Simpson for the Senate Judiciary Committee, so we began deconstructing the document, using code to extract key people and places mentioned. Realizing that the testimony itself didn’t provide enough background information, we pulled in additional help to start making sense of the tangle of relationships.
Exactly five years ago, we launched Connected China. Irene Liu, who led the project at Thomson Reuters, unveiled it at a conference at 4PM EST, and the site was blocked in China by the time we showed up at work the next morning.
Of a career spent interviewing and listening, Krista Tippett writes, “I’ve come to understand the cumulative dialogue of my work as a kind of cartography of wisdom about our emerging world.” Tippett has hosted the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being for the past 15 years, inviting guests from Janna Levin to John Lewis to Rosanne Cash into her studio for conversations covering everything from art and science to philosophy and faith.
Just ran across this photo of Darcy Bowden, my high school “Production Art” teacher, during a brief visit to Fathom last summer. Her class was a two-hour studio that I was able to take both my junior and senior year—my first exposure to real graphic design exercises (creating black and white ink drawings of concepts like “contrast,” or making artifacts in the style of other eras of design, and so many others...) and gave me a chance to build a portfolio that helped me get into design school. I'd wanted to take the class ever since reading about it in the course catalog as an eighth grader picking out courses for my first year of high school.
For the last couple of years we've sold posters (All Streets and Dencity) and a book (Frankenfont) as fun side projects that give us a chance to do some print work—in this graphic design-heavy office, we all still love print, and the chance to create proper physical artifacts. Since we give away the proceeds, I've been meaning to do an update on where we've sent the contributions.
For the past several years, my three brothers and I have convened at the eldest brother's house for the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament (also known as March Madness), doing our best to watch as many of the initial 32 games of the tournament during a melba toast and orange juice-soaked* four days of disregard for the outside world. Over time this has evolved—it initially started with just the two oldest brothers in an Arizona basement—into a gathering of up to two dozen friends, neighbors, wives, and kids.
We're looking for people to join us at Fathom. Sharp-eyed readers might note that the descriptions are a re-post, but we continue to be on the lookout for the right people to help fill our studio here in Boston.
This sketch started as something I wanted to build using the Fortune 500 ranking data, out of curiosity about the rise and fall of companies in a (subjective) editorial ranking.
After two (three?) years of receiving requests for prints of the All Streets project, we're finally making them available. In the course of preparing the project for an exhibition, I recreated the piece using more consistent data (updated TIGER/Line shape files from 2009), and, with Chris's help, wrote software to create tiles that could be reassembled into one very high-resolution image. (Most software isn't fond of images more than 30,000 pixels wide, so this part was tricky.)
The scene from Beacon Hill on Friday, where an unnamed Fathom staffer prepared for his departure from Earth (while also calibrating some computer vision code).
We're looking for people to join us at Fathom. For all the positions, you'll be creating work like you see on fathom.info, plus more mobile projects (Android, iOS, JavaScript) and the occasional installation piece. If you're a developer, design skills are a plus. Or if you're a designer, same goes for coding.
Our latest project for GE is about the striking shifts in age for eight developed nations. A large portion of Japan's population is between 60-64, and as that group grows older, it will have a significant impact on healthcare and the country's economy. A similar spike is seen amongst ages 35-39, which will have a similar effect a generation later.