FAQ
Start here to learn a bit more about how Polygraph works.
How do I contact you?
Use the form below, or email us at hi@polygraph.studio. Please include the following in your inquiry:
- Your company / brand / organization.
- If you have a project in mind or are interested in learning more about our services.
- If you’re working with a timeline and / or budget.
- If you’ve worked with Polygraph / The Pudding (or anyone on the team) in the past.
What do you do?
We’re a visual storytelling agency that’s focused on data visualization.
What do you make?
We’ve applied this data-focused visual storytelling to different formats, including microsites, large-scale installations / museum displays, video, editorial articles, blog posts, social platforms, newsletters, downloadable PDFs, internal / external presentations, etc.
Speaking of, what’s your connection to The Pudding?
Polygraph sustains our work on The Pudding. This allows The Pudding to operate in a purely journalistic space, giving us full creative autonomy on our articles. Despite being for-hire, we make sure our work at Polygraph does align with our mission at The Pudding: tell cool, public-facing stories with data and visuals, just for a purpose-aligned client rather than for ourselves.
What about average lead time and project timelines?
The more lead time (one to three+ months) the better when it comes to a possible partnership. It allows us to organize resources around the project. Timelines vary based on the deliverable. Very roughly speaking, for brand new engagements, we usually earmark at least 10 weeks.
Is there anything you don’t do?
We’re always most focused on the project being a work of data visual storytelling. We’re less fussed on the format itself since our team and external contractor network has a wide range of skills to make the story come to life.
There are a few things we shy away from almost always:
- Working with a client through a third-party marketing agency. Since our work is deeply collaborative in form and practice, we stick to working with the client directly.
- Internal (not public-facing) projects
- Dashboards that don’t have the overall goal of telling a story
- Projects that need to be delivered in less than a month
How do you approach projects?
We separate projects into a few stages based on format: strategy / brainstorming, narrative, data, design, and development.
Our team mirrors the staffing setup of newsroom graphics teams: journalists are trained coders / designers and highly-curious storytellers. We prototype visualizations at every step of the process, never getting bogged down in bloated hand-offs among strategists, designers, and developers.
What is the composition of your typical project team?
We’re uniquely composed of Journalist-Engineers, generalists who can handle project stages end-to-end: story, data, design, and front-end code development. This staffing keeps working groups tight, agile, and deeply collaborative. Our team works across The Pudding and Polygraph and has a variety of backgrounds that lends itself to the multidisciplinary projects we produce.
What kind of content do you visualize?
The content we visualize often falls in three buckets: comprehensive research (often locked away in PDFs), existing data, or editorial content (based on our own datasets and visual essays).
What type of partners do you work with?
We have and do work with large, global brands such as YouTube and Universal Music Group. We also collaborate with newsrooms and organizations / non-profits / philanthropies.
Where are you located?
We are a fully remote team (and have been since we started). Our Journalist-Engineers are based in Brooklyn, Great Barrington, San Antonio, Oakland, and Los Angeles while our contractor network is spread even more. We’re very accustomed to working with global teams in a variety of timezones.
Can I see more?
Yes! Please reach out to hi@polygraph.studio, and we’ll be happy to share an introductory deck and information about any individual projects.