Hi everyone. My name is Robert and these past two weeks I researched the locations of the top design firms in the United States.

My XYZ Statement is: investigating where the top design firms are located within the United States through designing a dot density map to better understand what cities have the most pursued design jobs.

This project relates to my MFA thesis which is an investigation of the distribution of design talent throughout the United States can be mapped through the cross-examination of various design annuals, books, organizations or associations, census data, the cost of living, and universities.

Due to time limitations, I specifically collected my data from one design annual competition. An updated and applied thesis statement to this project is: the investigation of the distribution of design talent throughout the United States can be mapped through the examination of the Graphis 2018 Design Annual Competition. 

Before we get started, I wanted to address some of my precious research. One of my previous research projects attempted to understand what types of maps should be applied to population density or similarly related topics. After analyzing data from designers and cartographers, as well as the everyday population, I was able to develop a deeper understanding of the topic. Three of my main findings included: that the map content is extremely important, the information needs to be easily interpreted and that choropleth maps are the most successful type of map depending on the topic.

To clarify, this is a choropleth map. It uses differences in shading and color to indicate average values of a particular topic within a certain area. The visualization I created was a dot density map. It uses dots to mark individual value of a particular topic. You will see what it looks like in the upcoming slides. A dot density map will work better for this project due to the limited data collection. If a choropleth map was chosen, there would be a scarce amount of data in multiple areas and it make the overall map very bland. Using a dot density map will allow users to quickly identify the heavily dotted areas as the most important areas.

To collect this data, I had four major steps: gathering the design firms from the 2018 Graphis Design Annual Competition, googling the design firms that were collected, finding the design firm’s website, and navigating the website to find the offices of the design firms.

This is what the overall process looked like. I did this over 125 times because the location of the firms were not listed for the annual competition.

I collected all my data into a spreadsheet. One thing to note is that some companies have multiple offices and I wanted to make sure those were included on the dot density map. After all my data was collected, I verified that all my data included firms. I had to cut a large chuck of my data because I found a lot of those recognized from this competition where one or two person projects or individuals stating that they were a design firm.

After the data was finalized, I had exactly 100 design firms

that had 135 offices

within 29 of the 50 states

located in 63 different cities.

I then began to sketch how to properly visualize this data. My main concern was figuring out the best way to label the map and breakdown the data below the actual map.

Here is another sketch of me physically drawing out my map before I visualized it.

Here is the final visualization. I understand that is is difficult to see due to the limited amount of data and the large breakdown of firms below the map. For those who took the class last summer, you remember that I had the same issue with my last project for this class. If you would like, you can go to my class folder on the drive to look at the visualization on your own.

Here are some close ups of the heavily dotted cities. The left side shows a part he west coast showing San Francisco and Los Angeles. The right shows the upper east coast including Boston and New York.

Here is a close up of the bottom of the map where all the firms included. I decided to breakdown this list by state and then alphabetically list firms. People often look for certain companies and this allow them to find specific firms quickly. Another option and future list that I would also include is listing cities in alphabetical order. That way one can see how saturated a city is with design firms.

After analyzing the map, there were only a handful of cities with 5 or more firms within them. Here are the top three cities with the most design firms: New York with 29 firms, San Francisco with 17 firms, and Chicago with 13 firms. Shockingly, 59 of the 135 offices are within these three cities. That is almost 45% (43.7%) off all of my data collected.

Below are my three key findings for this project. Based off of my general knowledge of the United States, heavily populated cities have the most Design Firm Offices. When looking closely on the East Coast, there was a constant marking of offices. There was typically a smaller gap there compared to other areas of the country. Another thing I found was that the largest firms had similar office locations. For example: Lippencott and Pivot Design both have Offices in Boston and San Francisco. Another common pairing of offices included New York and San Francisco, or Chicago and San Francisco.

Some of the next steps I have planned for this project would be to collect more data. As stated in my thesis statement, it would include information from: more design annuals, books, organizations or associations, census data, the cost of living, and universities. I would also like to overlay a choropleth population density map on this data to see if heavily populated areas have the most firms. Lastly, I would like to figure out who works at these firms, specifically their background: where they are from and where they went to school.

This data collected is important because it can begin to address the following questions: where do designers want to work? Does population size impact the top design firms? and why do top design firms work in the same cities?

This concludes my presentation of my project that addressed the locations of the top design firms in the United States. Thanks again for listening and any feedback is appreciated because this is the beginning of a large ongoing project.