James and I recently returned from a whirlwind road trip to SUNY New Paltz, to present at their inaugural Design Week. It was an exciting opportunity to share Fathom’s work with the wonderful students and faculty at New Paltz, and to conduct an introductory workshop on coding and information design.

Fathom’s recent Architecture of Typography workshop was a fun opportunity to hone our design skills and discuss trending topics in type.

Some of us at Fathom are easily sucked into geeky hobbies. When I first came across a site dedicated to SDR, or software defined radio, I turned my desk into a makeshift communication outpost for several days to learn the basics. It turned out to be surprisingly relevant to our core interests of data visualization and programming.

The social–sharing experience is a crucial and often overlooked element of information design. In addition to updating content and the UI/UX of our latest No Ceilings site, we are constantly developing its "shareability." Between deep linking, bite-sized graphics for stories, and pre-populated social links, we have made sharing as easy and visually compelling as possible.

One of the great things about working at an information design firm like Fathom is the opportunity to work with subject matter from all kinds of domains. In a single week, we've researched topics ranging from social issues that affect women's equality, database management, and student debt. Recently we were even pulled into the vortex of an international cartographic mystery...

Last Wednesday afternoon we noticed a massive traffic surge on the Fathom website, with all visitors loading one specific image of the All Streets project from 2008. How random! A quick glance at the referring page data showed us the cause: someone had come across All Streets and shared it on Reddit’s dataisbeautiful subreddit. And it was blowing up on the front page.