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.
“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.
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!