It's enjoyable to just drink in an image. It's effortless. That struck me as an interesting way of looking at it: I do all the grunt work so you can enjoy.

Some of the commercial work I do is helping people to improve their presentations and add some design thinking. There are so many amazing things in science, and such great data, which can often be locked away. It's in the minds of these amazing practitioners, who can't necessarily express what they want in a visual way.

Sometimes the data has a sense of a structure within it, especially if I'm looking at networks or relationships, which generally lend themselves to a certain style.

What I tend to do is blend quantitative with the qualitative to allow me to plot the qualitative data in some way. It's a question of what quantitative data are most applicable. So I'm playing with that, merging the two.

If you want to visualize something in its fullness you have to look at every perspective and every angle, and that means - sometimes uncomfortably - looking at things you don't want to look at.

Design has a powerful impact on the viewer. It has authority, and data also has the same air of authenticity and detail. It can be hard to argue with a graph, and it's hard to argue with data. So to combine data with a strong visual impact creates a powerful message.

We've seen it in the last U.S. presidential campaign 2016: both sides were trading graphs and circulating data visualizations to make their point. So the political establishment is waking up to the power of a good graph as well.