These graphs are inspired by the concepts discussed in Edward Tufte’s various books on information design. Most chart plugins on the market are filled with “chartjunk” – extra lines, colors, animations, and other distractions – that only subtract from the visibility of the data. These charts minimize features, labels, animations, flashy colors, unnecessary pop-ups as much as possible in order to achieve high readability.

The new splash page

The new user page.

Meaningful changes to the new user page included 1) display information that is more useful for users 2) condensing the action buttons into an easy to find location and 3) furthering integrating the YouTube-based music player.

Existing Like.fm User Page.

Mockup for a more functional menubar app

A concept for a quick and visual way to browse a friend's top artists

Another quick and visual way to browse see a friends top 10 artists.

Concept for display dense data about a user's listening habits in an accessible manner.

The Rip Van Wafels Website

With already a clear brand in mind, Abhishek hired me to design and build an online portal for his cookies. While his psychedelic and graphically heavy style made for vivid posters, the real work was to adapt that look to a website that maintained clear functionality. When working with someone with such a clear vision, strong communication, iterative design practices, and patience are crucial to happy clients.

Eureka Therapeutics is a biotechnology startup based in Emeryville, CA that focuses on providing innovative antibody services. But with a dated branding style, their company looked more like a biotech dinosaur than an up and rising star. Eureka Therapeutics asked if I could help them reimagine their logo for the 21st century in order to instill confidence in their clients.

My guiding vision was to come up with a simple fresh logo that clearly spoke “medical tech” but set itself safely apart from other biotech companies. I also wanted the logo to be an evolution of their previous logo and struck with their core service so I knew I wanted to keep the antibody motif.

Many other issues I had with many biotech logos is they commonly used a cold sans-serif typeface with no personality. These companies seem so determined to be professional/scientific that the human factor was completely lost. As a biology major, I thought back to the first-rate medical journals we used to read in school and how they portrayed a sincere and inviting look while easily maintaining professionalism. This medical-inspired serif supported with a precise typeface like DIN really drove home the look we were both looking for.

Business Card Front

Back of Business Card

Explanation of Design Choices

Explanation of Typographical Choices

Logos that didn't make the cut. Biotech and greentech company logos can often be easily confused. We wanted to make sure their Eureka's clearly embodied a biotech logo.

A design example for a website dedicated to exploring the topic of synthetic biology. The website, aimed for older adolescents with a basic biology background, is designed with a clean interface in order to maximize usability but it is also not afraid to have a little fun.

Text is made large to give it an "exhibit" like feel. The colors are chosen to represent biology but with the clean precision of engineering.

Design choices were made with adaptivity to physical exhibitions and tablet-like devices in mind.

A simple primer for the biology principles necessary to understand the the ideas behind synthetic biology.

A news section to stay updated on synthetic biology in current news.

Click here to view fullsize.

Many times, I find myself thinking about what the numbers actually are when reading about environmental claims. I’ve decided to start making information graphics illustrating answers to these questions. Here is the first in, hopefully, a series of many. It follows the trail of industrially produced nitrogen and the inefficiencies in the process.

I began with the infographic below but I realized it was not illustrating the scope of the problem correct. As a result, I created the piece above as an interactive graphic. I think it is an interesting idea to be able to dive deeper into a stand-alone graphic. As I wanted to lean more towards a graphic than an piece of interactive media, I tried to keep the complexity down and for it to neatly return back to its original form at the end.

My research project at Brown University involves trying to dissect the inner-workings of human t-cells – the shepherds of our immune system. By mutating individual proteins inside the cell and measuring the effect on the thousands of other proteins around it, we hoped to discover something new about how our bodies fight diseases. In an certain aspect, my research is exciting because the technology required to generate this magnitude and this type of data was developed only years ago. On the other hand, this type of data analysis is often overwhelming because tools to work with this data effectively are still lacking. In addition to my role as a researcher in lab, I also helped develop a visual system to analyze and present our data.

When brainstorming on how to design graphics, I set out with a few questions in mind:

1. What information will be necessary for the graphics be sufficiently self-explanatory?
2. How can I reduce visual noise?
3. How can I make the data more understandable?

When publishing our results, I found that it was confusing to simply report tables of numbers. By showing numbers as colors, readers could visually identify a single profile of a protein and its activity pattern.

A heatmap table of protein activity during t-cell activation. Yellow denotes increased activity while Blue denotes inhibited activity.

In addition, by overlaying our data over existing solved pathway structures, it helped readers to orientate themselves as well as make sense of our data. I was unsatisfied with how existing pathway structures were designed. Some were unnecessarily complex (by trying to show too many unimportant details) while others were too simply and left out crucial details. I came up with my own system of pathway diagrams that focused on emphasizing important points and reducing the “spaghetti factor” (confusing caused by too many intersecting lines).

Our heatmap data overlaid on the most-to-date t-cell activation pathway map based on decades of research. We hope our data will help to flush out more details of this pathway.

Because our research was not just about producing findings, but also to describe a novel method of conducting experiments, it was important for us to clearly lay out each step of our experiment – and to break down how different steps relate to different components of the experiment (SILAC quantitation vs label-free quantitation).

The general step-by-step procedure for the new method of pathway dissection developed in our lab.

My senior thesis is available here for your reading pleasure. Additional figures and illustrations are located at the end.

Redesigned comparison view page. (Compare to image below)

Peptide Depot is a custom FileMaker interface created by the Salomon Research Group at Brown University that provides a central location for phosphoproteomic peptide data management and analysis. You can BROWSE data by experiments, FILTER junk or statistically irrelevant data with pre-set filters, and ANALYZE data with a large array of tools such as data heatmaps, spectra viewers, network maps, and vast amounts of metadata from online databases.

As a undergraduate researcher in the lab, using peptide depot was crucial to my research but the software was obviously built with high functionality in mind but not usability. It took new users weeks of hand holding tutorials just to gain a basic understanding of the software. I decided to spend my free time in the lab redesigning the user interface from scratch within the limitations of FileMaker.

The original interface. Classic dilemma of tons of features but none of them are useful because no one knows where anything is.

The ball-shriveling full view of the comparison page.

My work began by interviewing seasoned users of peptide depot to see which features they actually used and poking around the software itself to see what each button did (and which buttons still worked). I then redesigned the interface based on two guiding principles. SIMPLIFYING the software by stripping away unused features and then ORGANIZING what was left into coherent chunks.

By accurately LABELING buttons and fields, GROUPING functionally similar elements, and making the layout between different pages more CONSISTENT, the software become much less intimadating and perhaps even pleasant to use.

Because much of the unused features were removed, software speed was dramatically improved. Speed is a crucial feature when working with millions of data entries.

I completed my work on the interface by surveying users about the new interface and then writing up a thorough user manual.

Redesigned page to choose which experiment to view

Redesigned page to view/edit which protocols were used for a particular experiment

Redesigned page to viewing the raw data.

Biosysbio is an annual systems biology conference held in Cambridge, UK. The goal of the conference is to bring together people working in Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology, and Bioinformatics. It is a platform for those in academia, industry and policy to meet and interact through talks, workshops, and social activities. Unlike many other biology conferences focused on prestige, Biosysbio strives to be fun, youthful, and promote the spread of new and novel ideas.

I was contracted by one of the founders of Biosysbio to redesign the logo more fitting for current times. After working through many different iterations, we decided upon a logo that that was distinctly biological in nature but went a different path from most other professional science logos. After their satisfaction with my work on their identity, I was rehired to redesign their website and also to transfer it to a content management system to better suit their social media needs. Again, diverging from traditional science conference websites, I wanted to make something that felt modern and youthful to attract burgeoning young scientists. The website needed to convey the idea that the conference was going to be more of a start of a community than just the usual lecture conference. After all, this was a conference started by young scientists for young scientists. In order to accomplish this, I choose sleek playful colors and utilized a modern typographical style for the website. In addition, we integrated some popular social media sites such as twitter and friendfeed to keep members updated.

Currently, I am working to build the website on top of the Joomla CMS. This will allow users to interact through a blogging system and user forums and further help to build a new scientific community.

The Ivy Film Festival is the largest student-run film festival in the world. Every year, they receive hundreds of film and screenplay submissions from undergraduate and graduate students from around the world. The Festival has also featured prominent and acclaimed speakers such as Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Adrian Brody, and Oliver Stone.

In 2009 and my senior year of college, I was contacted by the festival and asked if I would do them the honor of imagining a visual theme that year’s festival.  Given the popularity of festival as well as my own interest in cinema, I graciously accepted.

After learning that the keynote event would be about the difference between current Hollywood and Hollywood during the golden years, I wanted to pick a theme that could represent both eras. Keeping in mind that the marketing should also be hip, trendy, and attract a college-aged crowd, I decided on a visual campaign inspired by Saul Bass.

Themed posters promoting the Ivy Film Festival 2009

Saul Bass is a graphic designer stemming from the fifties who made an influential mark on the visual identity of Hollywood – particularly film title sequences. His style was very minimal yet raw and humorous. Some of his major works include title sequences for Vertigo(1958) and Man with the Golden Arm(1955), yet his work continues into the present day for films like Goodfellas(1991) and Casino(1995). Undoubtedly, his long and consistent presence in Hollywood has inspired many other film visuals such as those for Catch Me If You Can(2002) and Burn After Reading(2008).

Front of T-shirt

I intensely studied Saul Bass’ use of color, typography, and minimalism in order to recreate the feel of his title sequences. Another interesting concept I tried in some of the posters was to capture the motion of title-sequences in a single shot (see the posters for “Getting it Written” and “Student Film Screenings”).

Back of T-shirt

I met regularly with the festival director and publicity team to make sure they were satisfied with my work. There were definitely times when my design sense would conflict with what they wanted, but we woud also discuss through our problems and pick the solution that would create the most effective advertisement campaign. After weeks of strenuous sketching, designing, and meetings (also in midst of writing my senior thesis), I created a set of 4 posters, a festival t-shirt, and other publicity items for the Ivy Film Festival. I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment when everyone in the festival told me how excited they were with my work and, especially, when I received a personal complement from the CEO of Paramount.

Poster for Keynote Event

Poster for Screenwriting Panel

Poster for Business Panel

Poster for Student Screenings

IFF T-shirt designs

In the final project of Information Design at RISD with Krzysztof Lenk, we were asked to keep track of how we used our time each day for roughly three months. The goal of the project was to present the information in a meaningful way – however we decided that would be.

I believed that meaningful design of information can be used to to either convey a point or to tell a story. Seeing as the information was very personal, I was more interested in using the it to tell a story. I soon realized there exist many stories even in a single life over a short period of three months. Instead of trying to melt all the information into one graph, I thought I would let each part of my life tell its own story.

I split my time up separate stories – school, research, social life, planning my future, etc. I kept track of not only the time I spent on each part of my life but important events as well so that I could put the time spent in context. Also, I realized what makes interesting stories is not what usually happens but things out of the norm. Therefore, I wrote a computer program to change the opacity of the bars so that the more the amount of time I spent on something varied from the average, the more vibrantly it would appear on the page. This way, the reader’s eyes automatically look for the more interesting stories.

Ballons on top represent individual events that help to explain why I spent more or less time on a certain part of my life. I choose to express this piece of work in autumn-inspired colors because it took place during fall semester.

Preliminary sketches:

In Information Design with Kryzstof Lenk at RISD, we were asked to create our own instrument with ordinary household items, write a song, and then create a novel notation for our instrument.

After some awkward experientation in my house (to my roommates’ amusement), I found that striking a partially filled aluminum water bottle could create a rich variety of sounds. Depending on the angle in which you held the bottle, the air in the bottle resonates in different ways and can produce different frequencies.

While the design of my notation was much more minimal and simple than other classmates, I put a lot of thought into exactly what I wanted.

When dealing with information that people need to work with in real time, the diagram needed to be simple and quickly interpretable by the reader’s brain. So when planning and sketching out how I wanted to design my notation, I wanted to start at the very fundamental variables. How would I illustration time? Action? Intensity? The original idea was to represent each variable separately but I soon realized it would be hard for the reader to interpret multiple sources of data at once. Then I thought, why not incorporate all the information into one single symbol – the bottle itself – and represent different variables by varying simple visual attributes?

The result is what you see above.

After the initial designs, I was still somewhat uncomfortable with my representation of time. While representing time as distance on a line seemed like the best or only way, it was unclear how fast the reader’s eye should move along the line. What was the conversion for a unit of distance to a single unit of time? In addition, having to translate spatial distance into temporal distance added a layer of complexity to the notation that would have to be further interpreted by the reader’s brain. Perhaps I was thinking too much about it, but background as a student of science would not let this issue to ease. I decided the only way around this problem was the transcend the restrictions of print and make a notation that could directly represent time.

As a result, I built this interactive notation as a side project.

Sketching process:

In Information Design with Kryzstof Lenk at RISD, we were given the project of designing a passage by Rudolf Arnheim from his essay “Entropy and Art.” In addition to designing the paragraph aesthetically, I wanted to incorporate the meaning of the passage into the design itself – which was based heavily on the importance of order.

In thinking of ways to “order” the passage, I drew inspiration from exercises in grade school where we had to break down sentences into noubs, verbs, clauses, etc. I decided to base my design loosely on the concept by visually breaking down the passage by each sentence and then breaking down each sentence into coherent sections.

Typographic posters for panel events at the 2008 Ivy Film Festival.

Here are some completely functional interfaces and themes I made for OS X back in the day. (note: I was definitely form over function back then.)