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04 / 11

Unwrap the archive

Personal project · Data storytelling

I turned a very large public podcast archive into a story people could explore, a quiz they could argue with, and cards they could collect.

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An archive with better things to do

Podcast archives are rich in ideas and remarkably good at becoming a list of episodes. Lenny’s Unwrapped treats the archive as material instead: recurring ideas, memorable statistics, product archetypes and guests worth rediscovering.

Three ways into the same world

The main story turns the transcript corpus into a paced, visual journey. The quiz asks eight product questions and returns an archetype. The card collection makes sixty guests browsable as a set rather than another search result.

Research should still feel like play

Cream paper, hand-drawn type, orange accents and looping miniature worlds keep the data from feeling like a quarterly report that wandered onto the internet. Pokémon TCG was referenced heavily. Almost certainly to an unhealthy degree. The archive does the research. The interface gives curiosity somewhere to go.