The book, Track Record, revealed some concrete findings—like Aubert’s top five fonts (Trade Gothic, Akzidenz Grotesk, Bembo, Univers, and Arial)—as well as data that doesn’t seem to have much meaning at all. “It’s a commentary on informational graphics in general,” she says. “I never know when I’m tracking if it’s going to be revealing or not.” But taken as a whole, the stats paint a picture of a designer who doesn’t take anything as a given.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book is a series of drawings Aubert created in Excel. For 58 days, she developed a new image almost everyday—each one starting with the last—to build an evolving body of work. These pieces combine colors, symbols, and numbers on the software’s simple grid to form everything from rainbows and hearts to complex, abstract patterns. It’s poetic, low-tech, and oddly intriguing.

But beneath the aesthetics is Aubert’s realization that a piece of software can have a profound impact on how you work. If you use InDesign everyday, for example, you might not realize just how much the placement of menus and palettes affects your creative choices—things that become painfully obvious in a data-management program. “It’s like being in another country,” she says. “It gives you a different lens.”

The Excel drawings are also a product of Aubert’s interest in making creativity a part of her daily routine. She’s drawn to projects that might take only 15 or 20 minutes a day but over time turn into something substantive. This year, for example, she spent 10 days taking a photo every hour of whatever she happened to be looking at in her daily life. As it turned out, Aubert came down with the flu that week and rarely left her apartment.

Today the designer lives in Detroit and is in the process of figuring out her post-grad school life. “It’s kind of a tender moment,” she says, noting that she’ll be interested to see what she and her classmates do in the coming years. Right now Aubert is balancing freelancing, teaching, and personal projects—a category that still includes unlocking the power of spreadsheets with her Excel drawings.

LEFT: One of the pieces from Aubert's ongoing series of Excel drawings. CENTER: A book called 58 DAYS’ WORTH OF DRAWING EXERCISES IN MICROSOFT EXCEL pulls together drawings she created in this data-management program. RIGHT: Aubert's graduate thesis, track record, logs statistics about the designer's own work—everything from her top five fonts to productivity.