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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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.
When Arts for Hearts asked Chris to make something for their annual charity, we decided to elaborate on a previous sketch that Chris made for fun.
This sketch started as something I wanted to build using the Fortune 500 ranking data, out of curiosity about the rise and fall of companies in a (subjective) editorial ranking.
Besides becoming a father this summer, I learned a few other things about life and design. I worked as a graphic designer for ten years. Two years ago, I left my stable and profitable job to go to graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). This summer, I interned with the team at Fathom.