About

Practical Data was created by Phil Renaud and was started in October 2026.

We now have access to more information than we can reasonably be expected to understand on its own. We owe it to ourselves to build tools to make sense of it, if we don't want to cede the task of understanding to AI.

Consider Anscombe's Quartet as a demonstration of our ability to miss the patterns hidden in data, and consider how much more of it we're inundated with when working with LLMs. Addy Osmani talks about cognitive surrender as an inertial tendency when critical thinking becomes too difficult. I hope, in its own small way, Practical Data can help us avoid ceding the responsibility of understanding.

Colophon

Headlines are set in Cambridge, by Amy and Jen Hood of Hoodzpah.

Body text is Prociono, a one-weight roman by Barry Schwartz, released under the SIL Open Font License.

Numerals, code, and the example tables are IBM Plex Mono, by Mike Abbink with Bold Monday, also under the Open Font License. Every digit on the site is Plex: a unicode-range rule covering 0–9 sits first in each font stack, so numbers line up in tables without any markup around them.

The shading itself uses ColorBrewer schemes by Cynthia Brewer, applied with D3.