When Nicholas Felton headed over to Facebook last year, I thought we’d seen the last of what’s become an annual tradition, but it seems to be alive and well and still looking sexy. Felton, best known for his personal annual reports, is out with a 2010/2011 report that quantifies his life for the past two years.
The previous one was a tribute to his late father, so this year he had double the data. Most of the data is presented chronologically, but there is one panel on the next to last page that shows a comparison between the two years, which I found most interesting. More trips in 2011 to the parking garage, gas station, and the liquor store.
[Feltron]
His work is beautiful. I also loved listening to the 99 percent invisible show about the 2010 report (and the Radiolab episode that discussed it) (http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/dec/12/radiolab-presents-99-invisible/). The show made me think about personal taxes and my favorite accounting class during business school. We had stylized financial statement figures for several different companies. Using financial statement ratio analysis, we had to match up each company to its industry. So, for example, the company that had high inventory turnover, low margins, a lot of finished inventory but no work-in-process inventory was a retail store. The company with a really, really long cash cycle was an airplane manufacturer, and so forth. Financial statements seemed so vibrant this way! It’s like how a personal tax return can tell you so much about a person and their life: where they work, if they got married or divorced, if they have children, moved, went to school.