“8. … but looks can be everything: Good design still really matters. Something like this guide to the senior civil service (designed by Guardian graphic artist Jenny Ridley), or who knows who in the News of the World phone hacking affair (produced by journalist James Ball and designer Paul Scruton) work because they’re designed, not by machine, but by humans who understand the issues involved.

9. You don’t have to be a programmer: You can become a top coder if you want. But the bigger task is to think about the data like a journalist, rather than an analyst. What’s interesting about these numbers? What’s new? What would happen if I mashed it up with something else? Answering those questions is more important than anything else.

This stuff works best when it’s a combination of both. This guide to Nato operations in Libya is dynamically fed from a spreadsheet, which updates from the Nato daily action briefing. It looks good because it’s been well-designed; it works because it’s easy to update every day.”