Conventional web design tends to see tabular data as providing a barrier to creative graphic design. This project explores how such data can be displayed in a more abstract visual format, free from tables and the need to navigate through layers of information. The creative component reported here is the result of a personal exploration based on curriculum taught by the author in an undergraduate interdisciplinary course that merged perspectives from the fields advertising, graphic design and computer science to create personalized data-driven applications. Of particular interest to this project was determining if there are limits to the design elements that can be controlled by live data in a web page displaying weather information.

Seven data sources, connected to via application programming interfaces (APIs), were used to bring in 16 location-specific data points relating to weather, population, and geolocation. Literal text-based content displays used some of the data points, while others were used to control various visual elements (e.g., backgrounds, weather condition representations, and animation speeds). The result was a single visual web page displaying current conditions and forecasts using limited text, dynamically applied images, and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) animations, all of which required minimal user intervention.