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.
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In addition to taking on new projects, interns, workshops, and leadership in the last few months, we were excited to enter Records for Life, a design challenge sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The challenge focused on reimagining the child health record — a humble document that is responsible for a tremendous amount of information exchange during the first five years of a child's life.
It’s been exactly a year since Professor Kristen Coogan's Information Design class from Boston University came by for a visit, so we were glad to have them back for another tour in 2013. While it was a bummer that two members of the “dad” side of our office were out sick today, their empty chairs fortunately allowed us to accommodate seating for our 16 guests. Once everyone got settled on the third floor, Katy and Terrence began an overview of some of the work we’ve been cooking up in the past year.
Fathom has been doing a lot of work for Nike in the past nine months, in particular with the Nike+ FuelBand and the NikeFuel* data.
In September we were honored that Connected China was named a finalist in the 2013 Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards.
We all loved it when James brought his family to visit the office this summer — especially when his oldest daughter Joy took a particular shine to the Big Chair:
A post from Tim Ripper, who we loaned from Yale's graduate program for a summer internship. Sadly, we had to return him a couple weeks ago. Here he shares his experiences with one of the projects he worked on at Fathom these past few months. —B
Last week we were lucky to be able to welcome Dan Shiffman to the Fathom offices for a full day of Processing workshops. Dan is a professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program program at NYU, and is the author of Learning Processing and Nature of Code. (As far as we know, he is also our first guest to commute to the office via ferry from Maine.)
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.
If a picture is worth one thousand words, then think of the following process video as a nonfiction novella. You can remove your reading glasses as necessary.
When I was in graduate school, I took a type design elective taught by the excellent Cyrus Highsmith. The first week we each gathered and refined the basic formal elements that would define the nature of our typeface. In my case, I wanted a display face optimized for the screen — with rounded slab serifs, a roomy x-height for readability, and bowls with a distinctive tear shape to them. What emerged was Shoestring, a "simple, friendly, open type face for blogs. Suitable for boilerplates and headlines. Optimized for use on screen."