The numbers don’t lie is probably one of the biggest lies told about data and you'll see the proof below.
We got the idea of the Sheldon Report in January 2021. Now, almost a year later... lots of data have already gone uncollected... So we recovered some data and reconstructing others and most importantly, we only did it for a handful of projects that we’d love to share with you.
So please don’t frame this as a transparency report about the last year. Rather see it as a playful showcase that narrates our love story with hybrid forms of design, specifically design where data is the star ingredient and it’s topped off with other delicious spices like UX, typography, irony and sarcasm and over seasoned with fun 🎉.
Let the data porn begin
Below are the most significant projects we designed over the last twelve months.
March 2020 - March 2021
The project we designed for the European Capital of culture 2019 aims to push the boundaries of traditional open data portals, turning them into an informative experience that encourages a broader audience to experiment with open data.
March 2020 - April 2020
During the first wave of the pandemic we felt exhausted from having to find crucial information on badly designed dashboards. So we released Covidash, an open-source mobile-first dashboard for COVID data.
April 2020 - November 2020
Explore how the climate has changed in the last 40 years over 100.000+ European municipalities. This is our contribution to a better-informed debate surrounding the climate in partnership with the European Data Journalism Network.
This one started as a joke. We tried visualising the emails we exchanged during three projects. Yes, some weeks were jam-packed with intense email conversations 🤙 and yes again, some projects lasted a maaaaannnnyyyy weeks - or rather months.
But we’re lucky; despite the pandemic and the economic crisis, we worked intensely and constantly.
We used our GitHub to calculate the lines of code we used to create our projects. It’s approximate data, so it’s not proportional to the content each project conveys. Take GCC for example, this project relies on two template pages, but it represents the climate of over 100k+ different places. M19 on the other hand has more lines of code, but its content is less than 🤷.
84.321
lines of code
6.689
lines of styles
63.471
lines of code
1.164
lines of styles
83.098
lines of code
1.970
lines of styles
How many pixels did our projects take? Many, but again, data is deceiving 🤨. This data refers to the number of coloured pixels, so it boils down to more pictures, more pixels. This is why Covidash and Glocal Climate Change required so few pixels.
From which location did people browse our Glocal Climate Change project? Many! And which places did they search for? Many more!
Music is a mystery, an invisible mystery. It’s essentially vibrations in the air with the ability to alter our feelings. Now, that’s just as magical as the moment the turntable needle hits our favourite vinyl.
Throughout this crazy year, we added new vinyl records to our collection and we believe they represent us, and our souls, much better than other data. That’s why we visualized our vinyl collection.
We had a lot of fun designing our first yearly report, and we hope you had a lot of fun, too :). Data are the raw material we use to build exciting narratives, delicious project that transform complexity into something delicious and entertaining to experience. And always remeber...