Someone's Listening to Tufte

4 comments

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

Rinse Before Washing

16 comments

I open my weblog with a story of woe and despair. Until a week ago I was the proud owner of beautifully small, make that tiny, digital camera. I bought a Minolta Dimage Xi three-megapixel camera about five months ago and took it with me everywhere. In its short tenure, the camera served me well.

Due to its tiny size (it’s less than an inch thick) my friends and I joked about how easy it would be to lose it. Last week I outdid our wildest expectations and put the camera through a full cycle in the washing machine and dryer in the pocket of one of sweaters. Its case is now wonderfully clean but alas the camera is dead of course. Let this be a sobering lesson to other owners of pint-sized cameras so that this event did not happen in vane.

On a brighter note, the batteries appear to remain functional, so I’ll save a bit when I and if I replace my old friend. Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and friends for refusing to ridicule my loss.

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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.

Contact

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

Elsewhere

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

I connect with people I actually know in the real world on Facebook

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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