For this week’s production assignment on data visualization and generative artwork, I wanted to capture a very real and very dramatic part of my daily life: my cat Pieni’s obsession with food. Even when she’s been fed every single time she still manages to ask for more like she hasn’t eaten in centuries.
So I thought, why not visualize her lies?
Concept:
This project is a simple, animated bar chart that compares two things across a typical day:
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How many times I actually fed Pieni
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How many times she asked for food anyway
How It Works
Each time slot (from 8AM to 8PM) has two bars:
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A light blue bar representing the single time I fed her (yep, I did my part).
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A dark blue bar that pulses with animation to show how many times she pretended to be starving during that same period.
I added a slight pulsing animation to the begging bars to reflect how annoyingly persistent and dramatic her pleas are—even when her bowl is full.
Challenges & Decisions
While this project wasn’t technically hard, the main challenge was design clarity. I didn’t want it to look like a boring spreadsheet. I wanted it to be:
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Aesthetic and cat-meme friendly
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Easy to understand at a glance
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Somewhat interactive (through animation)
I spent a bit of time tweaking:
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The color scheme (cool blues)
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Bar spacing and layout
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Centering and visual alignment
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The legend—cleanly placed in the top-right instead of labeling every bar
What I Learned
This week helped reinforce how storytelling and humor can make even simple data visualizations fun and engaging. It also helped me practice:
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Pulse animation with
sin()for movement -
Using clean design principles in p5.js
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Balancing simplicity with personality