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 aren't a poster company, but over the years our love of print has driven us to design a collection of printed artifacts (see Scaled in Miles, All Streets, Dencity, and Frankenfont). Our print explorations often occur alongside client work, and reflect the range of interests (and occasionally obsessions) of folks around the office. We donate all of the print-generated proceeds to charities.
On April 25, 2015, a massive earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck Nepal. Since then, multiple aftershock tremors of magnitude 6 and greater have caused devastating casualties and damage in Kathmandu and its neighboring areas. Papua New Guinea, too, was in close proximity to a 7.1-magnitude earthquake earlier today. As our thoughts are with the affected families and communities, we've updated our earthquakes web explorer with the most recent data to shed light on the immensity of the recent earthquakes and their aftershocks.
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.
From the start of their education to the prime of their careers, women's professional paths look rather different from their male colleagues. The extent to which workplace inequity influences women's careers, though, varies by locale in a way you may not expect.
One in four girls worldwide marries before her 18th birthday. Child marriage violates basic human rights, and denies millions of girls worldwide the control over their health, education, and futures. One of the data-driven stories featured in No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, details the prevalence and negative impacts of underage marriage, along with the detrimental effects it can have for girls, their families, and their wider communities.
Scaled in Miles was recently featured on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. The show's producers had an interest in the role of album covers from the days of 12" LP's, and their counterparts in the digital age.
No Ceilings, our latest project for the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation, features a myriad of data-driven stories on the global progress of women and girls over the last twenty years. Cutting across gains in health, education, economic participation, leadership, security, and communication, the stories reveal areas that have experienced the greatest improvements, as well as places where the gaps remain. In the vein of women’s leadership, No Ceilings features a dichotomous story on women’s political participation: while women often vote at comparable rates to men, they are often under-represented in positions of national government.
In conjunction with International Women's Day and the upcoming session of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women, we're thrilled about the launch of No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. Despite gains over the last twenty years, we still haven't reached gender equality worldwide. The gap in the share of women in the workforce versus the share of men has barely changed in two decades. To make matters more grim, the United States is one of nine countries worldwide that doesn’t provide for paid maternal leave.
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...