ISAAC WOOTEN
Column Five

Column Five

The visual agency behind a generation of infographics. I built its 2013 site and the admin behind it on Rails and Angular, and led UI on Visage, its real-time data platform. The site, the admin and the brand world they implied.

2013–14
Senior Software Developer, Column Five Media
Inc. 500
One of America’s fastest-growing private companies
6 → 15
Six screens, fifteen brand surfaces
↗
Brand book
Result

Column Five turned numbers into stories. Founded in Orange County in 2009 by Ross Crooks, Josh Ritchie and Jason Lankow, it helped make the infographic a medium, for the NFL, Microsoft, DonorsChoose.org, McKesson, A&E and AARP among hundreds more, and wrote the book on it: Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling (Wiley, 2012). I joined in June 2013 as a senior software developer. I built the agency’s site on Rails and Angular, with an admin that let the studio publish its projects, case studies and clients itself, and led UI design and front end on Visage, its real-time data visualisation and reporting platform. What it taught me: when the work is the product, the site’s job is to get out of its way.

The brief

An agency that makes information beautiful has to make its own site the clearest thing it ships.

The 2013 site ran on Swiss discipline. Every section opens the same way: a short black rule, a red label in tracked capitals, then one large black statement. The home leads with a single piece of work and the studio’s approach; the work index filters twenty-one pages of projects by type, industry and search; capabilities is a list of thirteen; the clients page sorts the roster into sixteen industries. Behind it, the admin keeps every project, case study, asset and client in one place, and opens on the health of the site.

Five stripes

Five parallel red strokes folding into a C: a column of five, literally.

Rule, label, statement

One opening for every section, so hundreds of projects still read as one voice.

The work is the hero

Booklets, explainers and charts get the room photographs usually get.

High five

Testimonials signed off with a hand-drawn high five: rigorous, never cold.

The work

columnfivemedia.com in 2013: the red five-stripe logo and navigation, a featured NFL team website performance booklet photographed on wood, an explainer video, Our Approach, a High Five testimonial from DonorsChoose.org, a grid of featured work, and a footer with The Visual Agency, offices in Newport Beach and New York, and the Inc. 500 seal.
The home page: one piece of work, the approach, a high five.
The Capabilities page: a short black rule over a red CAPABILITIES label, two bold statements, and thirteen services from annual report design to web design and development, each with a triangle bullet.
Capabilities: rule, label, statement, list.
The work index: filters by type, by industry and a search, as black slabs over a four-column grid of infographics, explainers and interactives, twenty-one pages of them.
The work, filtered by type and industry.
Featured clients: a McKesson testimonial in bold italic, then the roster grouped into sixteen industries under red labels, from agencies to venture capital.
The roster, by industry.
The admin dashboard: a black bar with the red mark and menus for projects, case studies, assets and site content, over charts of server response time, throughput and error rate, browser load times, and a world map of page load by country.
The admin opens on the health of the site.
The admin’s clients table: name, URL, whether the client shows on the clients page, industry, every project they commissioned, dates, and Show, Edit and Destroy actions.
Clients, with every project they commissioned.

Brand system

Seen again years later, the site was already most of a brand. I locked what it held (signal red, black and white, a heavy grotesk with tracked red labels, the five-stripe mark and the Visual Agency badge, data as the hero image) and followed it into print, product, a data-visualisation system, a campaign, an editorial spread and a storefront.

  • Column Five. Brand world: an infographic poster, The Visual Agency, with a dot-matrix world map of reach, a mountain climb, 2009 and two cities, a donut by sector, the five values as bars and a growth chartBrand world · rendered from the locked brand DNA
  • Column Five. Logo variations sheet
  • Column Five. Mark construction: five parallel stripes on a modular grid
  • Column Five. Brand guidelines sheet
  • Column Five. Business cards, black with red edges and white
  • Column Five. Stationery: letterhead with a chart, compliments slip, envelope and folders
  • Column Five. Packaging: a box of components, Turn data into impact
  • Column Five. Merch collection
  • Column Five. Data visualisation system: line, bar and donut charts, a stat tile and a table, Turn data into a brighter story
  • Column Five. Website hero, Make complex stories impossible to ignore
  • Column Five. Mobile app screens, Data turns ideas into impact
  • Column Five. Campaign key visual, Turn complexity into clarity
  • Column Five. Editorial spread, Turn complex ideas into clearer stories
  • Column Five. Billboard at dusk, Turn data into action
  • Column Five. Storefront at night, the five-stripe mark over the door

The site and admin are the work. The brand world is a 2026 study made with my own tool from them, not work for Column Five.

We specialize in creating beautiful visuals that tell stories to educate, inform and inspire.

Column Five, 2013

Role

Senior software developer at Column Five, 2013 to 2014. A 2026 study for the brand world.

The site

columnfivemedia.com on Rails and Angular: home, work, capabilities, clients, about, blog and jobs.

The admin

Projects, case studies, assets, clients and site content in one place, with the site’s server and browser metrics on its first screen.

Visage

Lead UI designer and front-end developer on the studio’s real-time data visualisation and reporting platform.

Fifteen surfaces

From the locked brand DNA: logo system, guidelines, cards, stationery, packaging, merch, a data-viz system, web, app, a campaign, an editorial spread, billboard and storefront.

  • Front-end engineering
  • Rails & Angular
  • UI design
  • Data visualisation
  • Brand DNA extraction
  • Brand systems

Next

The agency lives in the archive with the rest of the studio years.

Browse the archive →