Data Cake

192	Pieces of Coverage
1,290	Facebook Engagements
581	Tweets

A personal project that took on a life of its own

Way, way back… early in my venture into the world of data visualisation, I was trying to work out a process for visualising data, when I stumbled upon a simple four-step framework:

Data -> Information -> Presentation -> Knowledge.

I loved the simplicity.

But I did have a follow-up question:

What’s the difference between data and information?

I mulled this over for a while, then an answer sprang to mind, which led to the creation of this visual metaphor…

This was the first thing I’d ever created that earned attention online.

I remember the day it went live. I got up every hour that night to follow its progress on Twitter. Thankfully, I don’t feel the need to do that any longer, but it was exciting at the time!

My partner didn’t quite share my enthusiasm when I woke her up at 4am to tell her, “It’s got 400 tweets!”

“Shut up and come back to bed,” was the response.

She had a point.

Anyway, this simple metaphor seemed to strike a chord.

It has been used in presentations inside universities, governments and the OECD. And it went into print twice too – once in the intro section of I Love Charts (the book by the popular Tumblr blog), and again in an MIT textbook on Interactive Visualization.

This was quite a funny outcome for something that took us four hours to make one Sunday afternoon, including baking the cake.

I had my first taste of success.

And I was hooked.