The Pudding’s Portfolio

About the Project

The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays. We’ve been in the business of bringing you stories you didn’t know you needed since 2017. We have a team of 8 journalist-engineers, but we also collaborate with others to produce visual essays. Here’s a sampling of our projects from the last year:

1. Women are Superstars on Stage but Still Rarely Get to Write Songs: For this project we compiled a first-of-its-kind public database of every songwriter behind a Top 5 Billboard Hot 100 hit song since 1958. The opening of the piece scrolls you through the last 10 years of data using illustrated pictograms, and then expands to look back several decades.
2. 24 Hours in an Invisible Epidemic: Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we follow “Martin” and other pixellated characters throughout their day. Instead of looking at what activities they do, we looked at who they did those activities with. Our goal was to give the audience a better understanding of how loneliness impacts quality of life.
3. What Does a Happily Ever After Look Like?: We looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers featured in Publishers Weekly from 2011 to 2023 and evaluated each for its raunchiness (level of undress), art style, and racial diversity. The audience can scroll through each section as if they were in a bookstore and can building out a reading list of their own. We also commissioned a meta illustrated cover of the author for the opening.
4. Quantifying the Diva-ness of National Anthem Performances: We listened to 138 National Anthem performances (so you don’t have to!) and compared each to the standard melody to see which artists deviated the most. We find the biggest diva (or deviator!) for each phase. The piece concludes with a giant heat map where you can listen to every performer phrase-by-phrase.
5. The Flipbook Expirement: We set out to create the longest collaborative flipbook animation ever, asking people to trace the previous person’s drawing. We recieved over 22,454 drawings, resulting in an 8-minute animation. We also learn some things about right-hand dominance and online behavior along the way.