Creativity is not an activity; it's a mindset. It all starts with thinking in possibilities. Think outside the Show Me box. Even if there’s a direct application, you will always learn, be inspired—or, hopefully, be inspiring—by taking the scenic route.

Together with my colleagues at Infotopics, I strive to create a world in which everybody can make well-founded decisions based on transparent data. With that in mind, we build beautiful dashboards in Tableau.

This project with Ludo started with a challenge we set for ourselves. We wanted to not just turn our own thinking upside down; we were going to flip over the whole concept of data visualization. Instead of going from data to visuals, we wanted to go from visuals to data. One thing led to another. After starting with “let’s visualize a picture in Tableau,” we soon ended up with “let’s rebuild Photoshop.” Why? Why not! I’m not a programmer or a photographer; I’m just inconceivably curious.

This project started without a clear goal, but it was the ultimate opportunity to learn about the unknown. How will Tableau handle a scatter plot with hundreds of thousands of marks, for example? And how can we produce a lot of complex calculations using the fewest calculated fields possible?