There is a cattle ranch in Australia that is roughly 23,677 km², bigger than the entire state of Israel (about 22,145 km²).

I read this stat twice when I came across it, checked the source, and made the noise I always make when a number breaks my brain.

I’ve always loved big stats like this. I couldn’t tell you why. Something about a single number reframing how you see the world in under a second. No essay, no argument, just a figure that quietly breaks your brain.

So I went looking for more. A few at first, then a few more. And somewhere around the tenth, I realised I was onto something interesting. It wasn’t just that I liked them. They all gave me the same reaction, and that felt like it meant something.

As a designer, I couldn’t leave them in a notes file. To me, these were all screaming to be tiny pieces of editorial design. The number as the headline, everything else just context. Set the figure large, give it room to breathe, and suddenly it stops being a line of text you scroll past and becomes something you stop for.

That’s when I found the domain. A couple of tries in, I discovered there was a great one still available: omgstats.com

I’d half expected something like that to be taken, and it wasn’t. And the name does half the work, because it’s the reaction you have when you read one. You don’t need to explain what the site is for, the name tells you how you’re going to feel.

I bought it, built the site, and made one thing easy: share any stat, anywhere.

That was the whole idea, and it’s still the whole idea. Put a visual front end on some great data. Take something that’s already fascinating and make it look as good as it deserves to, in a form that travels. It sounds small (it is on purpose), but it has since shaped most of what I build. Structured information in, something visual and shareable out. I keep finding new places that same approach works.

I’ve also fact-checked every stat on the site. That isn’t optional, the entire thing runs on one promise: that the number you’re looking at is real, and fake numbers would sink it. A mind-blowing statistic that turns out to be fake isn’t a mind-blowing statistic. It’s just a bit of good typography.

There’s a lesson in here that I keep having to relearn: the best projects start with a reaction, not a business plan. I didn’t sit down to build a stats brand. I read some numbers, made a noise, and followed the gut feeling. The plan came later, and it’s still forming.

Where it goes next, I’m not sure yet. But I want to do something with the brand beyond the screen, and a physical game or quiz deck is the idea I keep coming back to. For now, the collection keeps growing (I have an AI agent on the case), which does’t help my stats obsession.