← STORIESPERSONAL DATA · DRAWN BY HAND, FED BY A DATABASE

Dear Simran

A postcard from her study log — in the tradition of Dear Data, where two designers mailed each other a year of hand-drawn weeks. This one redraws itself: every chai cup below is pulled live from the same log she taps after each study session.

This was my fortnight —
one cup for every 15 minutes of becoming a data scientist ☕
— loading her fortnight from the study log…
…and this was my month
thirty days, one hand-inked tile each — the darker the gold, the deeper the study
how to read these postcards ↴

Dear Data taught the field something the dashboards keep forgetting: data is a portrait, not a spreadsheet. Giorgia Lupi called it data humanism — count the things machines can't feel, then draw them like they mattered.

So this page counts minutes, but it's really counting something else: evenings after ten-hour workdays where she chose statistics over the sofa. The wobble in every line is deliberate. So is the practice.

Nicholas Felton spent a decade proving the other pole — his Annual Reports quantified a life with industrial precision, and Facebook hired him to design Timeline off the back of them. This postcard tries to hold both poles at once: Felton's discipline in the pipeline, Lupi's tenderness in the ink. The data is fetched, joined and aggregated like any production report; then it picks up a pen.

And because it is a correspondence, it needs an addressee. This one is written to the Simran of next year — the one who will scroll back through a wall of gold tiles and remember exactly which evenings they cost. Dear Simran: keep going. The cups are adding up.

◈ WHAT THIS PIECE DEMONSTRATES
✎ FIELD NOTES — A DRAWING THAT IS ALSO A PIPELINE

The trick: hand-drawn is an aesthetic, not a medium. Each stroke is SVG with seeded jitter — wobbly like ink, reproducible like code.

The data: fetched live from her assistant's public endpoint (aggregates only — streak, minutes, topic; never content). Log a session, refresh this page, the postcard grows a cup.

The lineage: Dear Data (Lupi & Posavec, MoMA) for the soul; Felton's Annual Reports for the discipline; her own daily ritual for the ink.