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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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.
A few weeks ago, Slate launched "Top Right", a project "to identify the Americans who best share Edison's dual talents for inventiveness and practical thinking."
What does it mean to be one in ten thousand? If this was the incidence of, say, blue skin — am I likely to encounter a blue person in my lifetime? Would it happen once? Many times?
What’s better than typography and ragtime music? A typography game and ragtime music.
Scenes from the Fathom studio mailroom as we process our first batch of orders for the All Streets poster. Head over and grab yours while they last!
After two (three?) years of receiving requests for prints of the All Streets project, we're finally making them available. In the course of preparing the project for an exhibition, I recreated the piece using more consistent data (updated TIGER/Line shape files from 2009), and, with Chris's help, wrote software to create tiles that could be reassembled into one very high-resolution image. (Most software isn't fond of images more than 30,000 pixels wide, so this part was tricky.)
Katy always tries to steal the key to the third floor. How to stop her? With a key ring that's too big to fit in anybody's pocket of course!
Scientist and science writer Sam Arbesman just paid a visit and showed us his research on how and where innovation occurs. Sam draws from theories of scalability of cities, social network data, and experiments in cooperation to see how the number and quality of human connections affect innovation.