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.
We're pleased to announce the launch of our new podcast: Especially Big Data. While it deals with data both big and small, the podcast explores the many subjects data can document-- which can include everything from what you ate for breakfast this morning to the variability of global ocean currents. In other words, people collect data to track almost everything these days; and we're here to tell you everything it can explain, while also shedding light on everything it leaves out.
This past fall I spoke at the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) SATE conference at Carnegie Mellon University. SATE stands for Storytelling, Architecture, Technology and Experience — the core elements of themed entertainment — and by "themed entertainment" they mean amusement parks like Disney World and Universal Studios, among others.
We're excited to announce our latest project, an interactive timeline for GE's corporate website showcasing their transformation as a company over the last 100+ years. GE is one of the world's largest companies, and that only feels more true as you look through their history, and see how they have influenced almost every sector of technology and industry. From healthcare to aviation, energy and power to television, GE has touched it all.
We’re happy to report that for another year, our curiosity and love of print have enabled us to give back to our local community and beyond. Our latest printed project—The Preservation of Favoured Traces—continues the tradition. Proceeds from all our books, offset posters and on demand posters are donated to organizations that support areas we are interested in. From supporting female entrepreneurs to encouraging more active and sustainable transportation, the diverse interests of folks in the office are reflected by our areas of donation.
The Android Experiements are composed of a gallery of creative open source projects developed for the Android platform, and were introduced as a way to “encourage more developers to challenge how we interact with the devices we use every day.” In the spirit of the experiments, we set out to challenge how users interact with their Android Wear devices, and in doing so challenged none more than ourselves.
Fathom’s recent Architecture of Typography workshop was a fun opportunity to hone our design skills and discuss trending topics in type.
For the past few weeks, I have served as Fathom's in-residence explorer of 3D printed information design with Formlabs’ Form1+ printer. Because my goal was to focus on the physical medium and form, I tried to stay away from directly 3D-ifying data visualizations that already exist in 2D (think extruded line graphs, bar graphs, etc.), or from arbitrarily mapping data points onto 3D space for the sake of aesthetics. Instead, I zeroed in on the features of physical objects that cannot be expressed on a screen, breaking them into two categories: material and interaction. More on forks later.
Hot off the press—and just in time for the holidays—are two print projects that look at the six editions of Charles Darwin's, On the Origin of Species. Originally developed as an interactive piece, we decided to continue our tradition of producing and selling unique printed artifacts. And as always, all of the proceeds from this work will be donated to charities focused on education, science, music, art, food, and homelessness.
In my last blogpost, I showed some visualizations generated by usage data from our tool Mirador. These visualizations rely on the calculation of a "distance" between variables in a dataset, and Information Theory allows us to define such distance, as we will see below.