Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross / Catalogtree

Arnhem, The Netherlands

Catalogtree, a multidisciplinary design studio run by Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross in Arnhem, The Netherlands, takes their name from a technical term for filing structures—a perfect fit for their system-based approach to visualizing complex data. Their work has appeared in I.D. magazine, idea magazine, and the book Area 2, among others.

“We design by talking. With complicated projects we use our chalkboard as a tool during our discussions to quickly sketch the outlines of a project.

When we were commissioned to create a graph exposing family ties between employees in Knox County, Tennessee, we were given some newspaper articles and transcriptions of county commission meetings. From this material, we had to determine who nominated who to be on the commission, who was working for or had family working for the mayor’s office or the sheriff’s office or both.

We actually figured out we were looking for this while drawing this tangled web of nepotism on the board. We took pictures of most steps in the process to be able to return to previous versions.”

—Joris Maltha