Someone's Listening to Tufte

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I've enjoyed reading Edward Tufte's books about displaying information effectively and have found them immensely informative and helpful for my work. I encourage anyone, no matter what your professional background, to purchase and study any of his books (you should probably start with Envisioning Information).

Earlier today I was pointed to Style.org by Steven via a Slashdot article. Jonathan Corum, who wrote all three articles on the site, certainly understands the principles Edward Tufte expresses. Corum's illustrations of winged motion and electoral districts are refreshingly simple and effective. Note in the illustration below (see the original image) how the solid line intuitively indicates the power in the down stroke and the dotted line indicates the passive recovery. The time-distance sequence is also subtle yet informative. All together very nice.

From "The Strouhal Number in Cruising Flight" by Jonathan Corum

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Jevon MacDonald -

Dude, Are you auto-generating the titles? (sorry to bust of this potentially excellent thread)

Daniel Burka -

I'll let it slide this time Jevon. Yeah, PHP automatically generated titles. My brother hooked me up with a little customization. In case you're interested, I'm also feeding up real text titles for search engines etc.

Jevon Macdonald -

It has been a long time since I have played with auto-generation of anything graphical, I was and am impressed.

Rob Fletcher -

http://www.angstyblog.com

Slashdot has informed me that Tufte has opinions about PowerPoint (published earlier this year) too.

Bio via LinkedIn

Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm the director of design with a startup called Tiny Speck and for several years I was the creative director at Digg. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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Summary

I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

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I'm not currently looking for any kind of work and sometimes I take a long time to respond to email, but if you'd like to contact me please send an email to daniel [at] deltatangobravo [dot] com

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I tweet when the mood strikes at Twitter

I sometimes review products on Silverorange Stuff

I sell my amateur photography on Clustershot

I post some of my personal photos on Flickr

I used to contribute on the Digg Weblog

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This Blog

The technology that powers this blog was built by silverorange on their Swat open-source web application toolkit. I'm no longer working on day-to-day projects at silverorange, but they're available for hire if you're looking for top-notch interface design or web application development.

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