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.
Our latest piece for GE (ge.com/visualization/annual) explores 120 years’ worth of their annual reports, spanning the years 1892-2011. The initial idea was to look at how words were used over time: plotting the emergence and disappearance of themes over more than a century of history.
Last week, Katy and I went to see Mark talk about Interaction in Data Visualization at Boston CHI.
On February first, Chris appeared at work with a clean face. He told us that this was the beginning of a charity stunt. Chris had joined a group of men who would shave, then grow, then partially shave again to raise funds for Community Servings, an organization that make meals for Boston’s ill.
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.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building two interactive installation pieces for the lobby of GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. The pieces are part of the GE Works campaign, which describes and organizes the company’s work with four verbs: Powering, Curing, Building, and Moving. Our job was to show how data can illustrate these first two activities.
...so we thought we'd ask some of our friends about their favorite colors.
What's the biggest issue with U.S. energy use? This summer, after Katie Peek at PopSci asked us for a new take on the energy flow chart from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we talked about which angle to make the most important.
“Unprecedented” is a popular word in PR. Lots of things want to be unprecedented, few are. But last year’s hitting the population mark of seven billion was truly new. And just like how, for the past decade, a mild day in December or hail in July feels like a premonition of global warming, a transit hall on the day before Thanksgiving now quickly contains the association: there can be no more babies.
Sometimes you need to meet the right story to make your own work come alive. For Frankenfont, it was the idea of setting Frankenstein, the novel, in a font made out of misshapen parts scavenged from PDF files found online.
Graphic Design: Now in Production opened this weekend at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The exhibition captures the expanding role of the graphic designer. Ben's pieces Frankenfont and The Preservation of Favoured Traces are on display and we really want to go see it all. Check how fun it looks setting up.