2021
Data Portraits
Reinventing the postcard
Futurice’s Marketing team approached me asking for a quirky, personal way to engage with our local business contacts in Sweden. In our discussions we fell in love with the thought of turning an ordinary postcard into a more innovative and engaging experience. I started experimenting with concepts that could make the postcard reflect the sender’s personality and ended up with the idea to turn the motif featured on the front of the card into a data portrait of its sender.
Team
Head of Marketing, Digital Product Designer
Designing data portraits
Our team came up with a questionnaire consisting of nine simple questions focused on the subject’s professional profile and ways of working. In order to depict the responses in a comprehensible manner, I designed graphical metaphors and analogies to represent the data in an intriguing way. This ranged from transforming their name into a personal background pattern, to mimicking an analog clock illustrating the subject’s most creative time of the day, or defining shapes to reflect their favorite coffee break snack.
Rather than creating each individual design manually, I wrote a custom piece of code using Processing to handle this part of the process for us. In the end, creating data portraits for an entire team became as simple as moving a CSV file with the questionnaire responses into a dedicated folder, and executing the code.
Conclusion
Over the course of this process, a seemingly simple task at hand unfolded into a much larger and more meaningful experience. Besides sparking joy and excitement at our clients and business partners, the data portraits turned out to be great conversation starters even within our own company. Read the full blog post.
