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.
As debates around the state transportation bill heated up this month, we teamed up with the Transportation for Massachusetts Coalition (T4MA) to create a series of infographics that capture the complexity of the Bay State's transportation network. Since most of the Fathom team commutes via public transportation (the rest bike to work), we felt strongly about contributing clear and readable graphics that could be used in the course of the T4MA advocacy campaign. We have a vested interest in seeing that network remain in good working order, accessible, and affordable.
I am fascinated with metro maps. You may be more familiar with the term "metro" as the T, subway, L, Underground, Tube, Tram, BART, Muni, Subte, T-bana, U-bahn, Tren-Urbano, SkyTrain, MTR, Tren Electrico, T-bane, S-tog, Rapid, and even Clockwork Orange depending on your home city.
When you have young children, at some point you will probably need to come to grips with the idea of vacationing at Disney World.
Thomson Reuters released their 2012 Annual Report online last week. While VSA Partners designed and implemented the site, we worked on a set of five graphics that highlight a selection of Reuters’s core business units.
For the past several years, my three brothers and I have convened at the eldest brother's house for the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament (also known as March Madness), doing our best to watch as many of the initial 32 games of the tournament during a melba toast and orange juice-soaked* four days of disregard for the outside world. Over time this has evolved—it initially started with just the two oldest brothers in an Arizona basement—into a gathering of up to two dozen friends, neighbors, wives, and kids.
Friends, foes, and country people: we would like to cordially invite you to experience the Fathom Bracket (2013 March Madness edition).
This post continues from “Of guanxi, kingmakers, and princelings,” describing how we approach projects and let the data inform the presentation. You may want to read that one first.
Working digitally has some similarities to the physical world. For example, when painting, brushes can break down, lighting can change, and models can shift. Often these variable forces have interesting visual results. We've collected a handful of our favorites from the Connected China project. This first image is the result of Katy testing out the homepage on Windows through VMware:
All of our projects start with a data set. As we begin designing a piece, we poke through the data to see how clean it is and what sort of stories it will support, and we investigate what form the final piece could take: is it an app? an exploratory tool? an infographic? At this stage, we'll use various languages or tools (Processing, Python, Excel, and R tend to be the most common) to build custom software that will help us interact with the data and test our ideas about what the data contains.
We are almost one week into the launch of Connected China! One notable discovery has been the early audience indicators: much of the site's traffic has come from within mainland China, and a majority of visitors worldwide are using browsers that have the zh-cn character encoding (suggesting Chinese language computers). This response is surprising given that the site seems to be at least partially blocked in China, with reports of blocked tweets and weibos (Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging site) cropping up even earlier.