IMNOTQUITEJACK

Nicholas Felton has a project that inspires me: his Annual Report series.  Nicholas collects data every day, and then creates an “annual report” for the year, detailing the progression of his travels, musical tastes, relationships, moods, and interests.  The result is a visually captivating.  I’m a sucker for infographics with good typography, and he’s a master at it.

For 2010, he tried something new: he created a sort of lifetime report of his father’s life, organized roughly by decade.  His father passed away in September of 2010.

The idea of compacting someones entire life into a pretty annual report is a little distasteful to me - a lifetime is so much more than a series of datapoints.  At the same time, I think it’s a great way to memorialize someone.  Any attempt at describing someone’s life necessitates some form of distillation, of selecting some details instead of others.  Over the years, I’ve tried several ways to memorialize my mother, who passed away in 2006.  With the multitude of documents and photos I’ve got, there’s plenty of data that I could use to create a Feltron Report.