Dykman got started anyway. His challenge, as he saw it, was not only to translate a large and amorphous concept into a print format, but to find numbers that lent themselves to understandable, enlightening graphics. “We’re a country obsessed with quantifying things about ourselves that actually reveal very little about ourselves,” he says. He wondered which statistics, out of all the ways of measuring Americans, could be meaningful. The goal was to illustrate who Americans are, and the question in Dykman’s mind was, what about us?

Listen to Dykman talk about meaningful statistics.

The answer could take any number of forms, ranging from which movies Americans watch to how religious they are, from how much they spend on donuts to how much they make each year. Dykman had sketched a possible approach when he had learned of the “American Mirror” project in 2004. He had been at lunch with then-Executive Editor Priscilla Painton who, intrigued by the idea of telling a story exclusively through graphics and statistics, was explaining Gibbs’ idea to Dykman. He had taken a Post-it® Note from his pocket and sketched a possible approach: produce a number of themed double-page spreads, each illustrating a different facet of American life.

As he considered how to address the vast topic of “who we are,” he resurrected the idea from the two-year-old Post-it® Note. First, he wrote down a list of themes. He wanted to choose topics that would capture significant features of American life. At the same time, he wished to present data that could challenge his readers’ assumptions. Numerous subjects seemed to require careful exploration, from crime to health, education, and religion.