Data publishing house

Odd Publications is a data publishing house co-founded in 2018 by programmer Darien Brito and graphic designer Jaap Smit. The venture repurposes the ephemeral nature of data into tangible objects of printed form, with projects that seek to re-evaluate our relationship with digital information and construct new meanings and narratives via generative design. The technical pipeline is built on LaTeX, Python, and Processing.

The Collaboration

The project pairs two complementary practices: Brito handles the code that scrapes, structures, and typesets data automatically, while Smit — a graduate of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague — specializes in book design and identity, with a focus on structuring facts and data into methodically-made and often humorous work.

A Tweet History

Their flagship project takes two months' worth of a user's tweets and transforms them — along with the format of Twitter itself — into a printed historical artefact of 600 pages. Typography plays a central role: simply switching from a sans-serif to a serif gives the text an entirely different weight, and details like hashtags rendered in italics without the # symbol quietly reframe the content as literature. Their first subject was Donald Trump, chosen for the sheer volume and political charge of his posts — making the contrast between platform and printed page especially sharp.

Internet Audience

A second project turns a different kind of internet residue into print. It collects the comments beneath a YouTube video and transforms them into an indexed dictionary — turning the observers into the observed, and asking whether a printed opinion carries a different weight than a scrolling one.

The Bigger Question

Both projects orbit the same central question: what happens when content that is ephemeral by nature is preserved in printed form? The result is simultaneously an archive, a design object, and a provocation — a reminder that what we say and do online exists, matters, and might one day deserve to be preserved. Odd Publications was nominated for the Dutch Creativity Award in the category Next: Side Project.

Recognition

We are happy to see our first projects featured on numerous websites.

• 2019 — Its Nice That
• 2019 — AIGA Eye on Design
• 2019 — Fonts in Use 'A Tweet History'
• 2019 — Fonts in Use 'Internet Audience'
• 2018 — Books from the future