A personal project that took on a life of its own.
When I first got into creating content, I was trying to figure out a process for visualising data. As part of my research, I started to wonder what the difference was between data and information. This led me to the idea for data cake.
The metaphor seemed to strike a chord.
It has been used in presentations in universities, government organisations, and even the OECD.
It has gone into print twice – once in the intro section of I Love Charts (the book by the popular Tumblr blog), and again in an MIT textbook about interactive visualisation.
A debate ensued on FlowingData in which the site’s visitors argued the merits of the metaphor (I didn’t get involved).
- Featured in Storytelling with Data, FlowingData, Visualising Data, SmartData Collective, Computerworld, The University of Western Australia, and the OECD
- Linked to by 392 sites
- Personally responsible for the concept and creative direction
This was the first thing I made that received attention online.
It was a pretty pleasing result for something that took 4 hours to make one Sunday afternoon (including baking the cake). When people started tweeting about it, I got up every hour that night to follow its progress online.
I’d had my first taste.