10 Years of Everydays: Visual Thinking Through Long-Term Practice

This talk reflects on The Everydays, a 10 year daily visual practice that has functioned as both a creative discipline and a personal record of my life. What began as a way to practice making gradually became a way to understand how I think, how I change, and how patterns emerge over time.

Through more than 3,600 daily works created under consistent constraints, the practice has helped me notice recurring decisions, habits, and visual tendencies that are difficult to see in short term projects. Over time, repetition revealed where I take shortcuts, where I linger, when I experiment, and when I retreat to familiar forms.

Rather than treating each piece as an isolated outcome, this talk looks at the practice as a whole, as a living archive and a longitudinal record of decision making. Shifts in tools, energy, confidence, and attention are visible across years. Periods of intensity, doubt, change, and stability are reflected not through explicit data, but through form, color, complexity, and rhythm.

This practice matters deeply to me because it became a way to externalize my internal process. It allowed me to see my own patterns with distance and compassion, and to understand how creative work can act as a journal that records not just what we make, but who we are at different moments in our lives.

The talk connects these reflections to broader conversations in data visualization and visual craft. It asks what we gain when we treat long term practice as a form of data, and what becomes visible when time itself is the organizing structure. Instead of metrics or dashboards, the signal emerges through accumulation, consistency, and change.

Structured as a narrative walkthrough, the presentation moves between personal reflection and pattern recognition, showing how sustained making can surface insight without quantification. The intended audience includes designers, artists, data visualization practitioners, and educators interested in process, craft, and reflective practice.

Participants will leave with new ways to think about creative work as a record of lived experience, tools for noticing patterns in their own practice, and frameworks for using repetition and constraints to better understand how they think and evolve over time.