Some background on what the hell this is:

This visualisation was crafted in illustrator from data collected via iTunes, Daytum, Twitter and plain notes on paper.

Inspired by and modeled from the Feltron Annual report by Nicholas Felton, and the work of the dutch design duo Toko.

The Feltron Annual report seems to get bigger each year, starting in 2005 and released every subsequent year since. Each edition seems to include more and more obscure details to the point where he is now tracking the amount of times he stops to track the data itself - I know, it boggles the mind.

Nicholas Felton at his desk, the planner on the top left looks very similar to his daytum interface

Nicholas is also the co-creator of Daytum.com, as site that I wasn’t aware of until I started this project. A quick look around his office and it becomes obvious where he got the aesthetic from. It is a online tracking system for anything you care to track, I personally track; Time spent in hours, average hours of sleep per night, what my eating habits are, how much I drink, and what my mood is.

It’s a great idea until you are away from a computer, then you forget to put things in and the entire thing becomes moot. However daytum has a neat iPhone App that lets you add things on the fly which not only makes it easy, but also idiot proof.

Without Daytum I would have never finished this data visualisation or at least had to fudge the numbers until I may as well have made up the whole thing. Now I’ve actually got something that I can look back on and see for example, that I miss breakfast more than half the time - something that I previously wasn’t even aware of and that i’m doing something about.

Toko are two dutch designers who operate out of Sydney (when they aren’t in Amsterdam) and they have the opportunity to do some truly interesting design with clients such as Mini and the City of Sydney. They also have a knack with annual reports, and rather than just showing the raw data they instead use it to form a piece of art that’s both functional and beautiful.

My visualisation tracks things that are more personal to me with regards to type choices for example, and i’ve gone for a different aesthetic to the Feltron reports mine are more about creating a contrast within the pages and trying to mix up the design, it's also built to be printed as a book which also works as a pdf but that may be something that I eventually change for the next edition. Obviously this being my first attempt, will be something I intend to iterate upon until I’ve designed something that is simple yet different enough to not all appear the same.

You might notice that currently this report has a (.5) after the title, this is due to the fact that i've only in the last few months been collecting data and as such wont be able to produce a definitive report until the beginning of next year. This is something that I fully intend on continuing to produce, to both keep my creativity flowing and maintain my sanity when just working all the time.