On January 23, Bloomberg.com released its new, interactive Billionaires Index, the latest research tool created by its seven-member visual data team. Headed by Lisa Strausfeld, a lauded designer and former Pentagram partner, the team includes three SVA alumni—Chris Cannon (MFA 2012 Interaction Design), Jeremy Diamond (BFA 2004 Graphic Design) and Kenton Powell (BFA 2008 Graphic Design).

A continually updated storehouse of Bloomberg’s exhaustive reporting on the world’s wealthiest, the Billionaires Index charts 100 individuals’ fluctuating net worth, compiles their biographical information and news clippings and is searchable by industry, geographical location, age, gender and much more. It is the second data visualization product the team has launched. The first, State-by-State, introduced last October, charts the ever-changing demographics and economic statistics for the United States.

Diamond, an interaction designer, creates prototypes of the team’s ideas, to be coded and fully built out by a developer. Powell, a designer, compiles and organizes data, using graphing and plotting software to determine how best to present the information. And Cannon, a senior designer, helps set the design standards—the typography, color palette, iconography, and basic look and feel of the products. Hired by the team’s design director, Hilla Katki (who has taught at SVA), after meeting her at the MFA Interaction Design Department’s job fair last spring, he describes the relevance of his graduate work to his current position as “kind of uncanny….This job is a natural extension of where my thesis was going.”

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