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.
Last week, Katy suddenly told us she was going to Hollywood. She picked up a glamorous looking suitcase, and was gone.
Do you ever have that overwhelming urge to design something tangible? Involving lasers? Me, too. Which is why I took a break from screens a few Fridays ago to toy around with a quick prototype and send it off to Ponoko. The idea was to have a handy stencil to quickly draw a thumbnail window at the correct proportion for an iPad, and at just the right scale for the grid inside a Moleskine Extra Large Squared Cahier (this designer's sketchbook of choice).
Anyone who writes about the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates mentions her productivity. Since 1963, when she at age 25 came out with her first collection of short stories, Oates has published over 120 books. Stephen King, also known for his productivity, has a mere 75 to his name.
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.