The people at the desk
Who keeps the desk
The office exists because a chart hung in a corridor settles an argument that a spoken percentage will not.
Logicmatrixgrid Analytics is a drawing office, not a newsroom and not a ministry. It began when Nino Beridze was still marking Saturday charts for a Tbilisi paper and found that the same harvest question returned every autumn, asked by cellars and by the paper’s own desk. The figures existed. The sheets that could hang in both rooms did not.
The atelier opened on Chavchavadze Avenue so that work could be done at a table large enough for a yearbook, a customs abstract, and a pencil grid at once. Georgia’s published returns — harvest bulletins, passenger counts, trade by port — are the ordinary diet. A client’s own ledgers are welcome when they can be lined up with those returns without a quiet change of unit.
We work in English and Georgian at the sitting. The sheets themselves are drawn with units and sources written in the language the board reads. We have no method beyond that: name the question, list the sources, draw only what the sources will carry, sit with the result.
The relationship we want with a client is repeatable and plain. A first briefing teaches the grain. Later outlook sheets can reuse it. We will say no when a series cannot be found, when a comparison is fashionable but unfair, or when a forecast sentence would have to be tighter than the breaks in the record.
Nino Beridze
Principal chartist
Nino came to the desk from newspaper graphics, where a Saturday edition still needed a harvest chart that could be read at arm’s length. She takes the question, the grain, and the sitting.
Giorgi Tsereteli
Source researcher
Giorgi reads Geostat tables, customs abstracts, and the notebooks clients think are unusable. He will not let a chart leave the atelier with an unmarked join.
Elene Maisuradze
Board readings
Elene sits with boards that have not lived with the figures. She keeps the hanging order honest and the forecast range no tighter than the sheets will bear.