For my data portrait, I decided to use my daily caffeine intake to reflect changes in my daily routines and workload throughout the week. I drink coffee quite regularly, at least one cup and sometimes up to two cups a day. In addition to that, I realized that a lot of the other stuff I drink and eat are also high in caffeine, and therefore I did some research on the caffeine amount for each kind of food/drink, and grade them from the most caffeinated to the most, using different shades of brown (the darkest brown represents the most caffeinated and so on).

Reflection

In order to make the visuals look organic, I used Photoshop to draw all the elements (brown-brush strokes and food illustrations) and imported them into p5, and used arrays and conditionals to animate them. At first, I only planned to use brush paints to portray my data, but it turns out rather plain (mostly because there aren’t enough data points to amount to the aesthetic I was going for). Therefore, I decided to add another layer to it by putting illustrations of all the food/drinks on top of the original painting. I also spent a lot of time experimenting the timing of the whole animation, in order to make it upbeat, energetic and playful, as well as keeping the audience’s attention.

Credits

This project was created based on the Data & Network by Katherine Moriwaki & Xin Xin.