I, with m’colleague Adam Frost, teach masterclasses in Data Visualisation for the Guardian, as well as running corporate training through Add Two Digital

The Metropolitan is a weekly Substack newsletter I’ve started with Rowan Davies and Chris Waywell. Its a cultural review magazine about the pop-cultural and social experience of British Generation X.

We’ll be covering movies, books, films, TV programmes, music, advertising and marketing, social trends, and other cultural phenomena that we find brilliant, interesting or resonant. This could mean Life On Mars or Angela Carter, Jaws or Jack Reacher, Kaye Webb’s reign at Puffin Books or the way that men’s friendships play out in the presenting teams on popular podcasts.

You can sign up here: https://www.themetropolitan.uk/

Our book ‘Communicating with Data Visualisation’ will be published by Sage in November 2021.

Based on our long-running Guardian masterclass, it aims to provide a fun, accessible, nuts-and-bolts exploration of how to turn a huge spreadsheet into a clear and beautiful visual. As well as being a ‘how to’ guide, it also contains a portfolio of best practice examples, designed to help you find the right chart for your story.

The book is aimed at anyone who works with data as part of their professional life, from design students to data journalists, from school teachers to scientists.

Find out more about it here: addtwodigital.com/book

Every Christmas I write a seasonal story that I then release as a 24 episode podcast (usually narrated by the splendid Jon Millington), for the first 24 days of December.

Find out more

I’ve got into the habit of writing a little creepy story every Halloween, and now I appear to have gotten into the habit of making little videos for them too.

Why do all these habits always end up making more work for me?

On ongoing project to depict as many musical genres as I can as common British birds, for no other reason than I enjoy it.

This was actually made for a talk I was giving at the British Library but I ended up not using it. I found a crowd sourced database of everything the Daily Mail says cures or causes cancer (or frequently does both) and started to see certain patterns. So I visualised them. This chart was shortlisted for an Information is Beautiful award.

A project about the folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm. I used data about the language of the tales to create a 3D explorable forest of stories, emphasising their role as part of a lived experience.

This came out of the idea that the equivalent of the homicidal village of the golden age of murder was the modern office building. And then I realised that that kind of mystery was all about data and then I could tell it through visualisation.

Fightbox was a revolutionary TV game show that never started a revolution, mostly because the first season wasn't much good and we never got a second season to try and fix it. The BBC had technology that allowed us to film video gaming as a live sport. Competitors could download a game and create their own avatars and then bring them to the studio to fight. I co-created it with Finbar Hawkins (among others) and my godson loved it, but then he was only 5 at the time.

The Mazehouse was something that hadn't quite been done on British TV before - a cross platform, interactive drama that was told online, in broadcast and even on mobile (SMS in those days). Created for the Sci-Fi Channel UK it was a ghost story about the investigation of a haunted house. I co-created and wrote it along with the wonderfully hairy and the wonderful and hairy Finbar Hawkins.

A replica site is up at: themazehouse.wordpress.com

two-minutes.com was one of the first interactive dramas in the UK. It was a murder mystery set round the eclipse of 1999. As the story unfolded, the audience could collect clues and find the killer. I co-created and wrote it with Finbar Hawkins and all the parts were played by the team at Bomb. It was sponsored by lastminute.com and when I called to tell them we had a winning solution to the mystery they were surprised: "We thought it would have been called off because of all the murders". I don't they were quite ready for interactive drama.

A replica site is up at: twominutesmystery.wordpress.com