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 York Times wows again with an impressive organic visualization of the national emotional response to the death of Bin Laden.

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.

American Rustic. Even though this style goes completely against my general design principles, I feel that there is definitely a place for these types of objects in the world. Functional design makes the world run – but this type of design gives the world character.

Chartwell font by TK Type. An innovative way to quickly build infographic charts using font ligatures. I particularly love the stylings of their bar graphs.

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.

Instead of working on visualization a different idea, I wanted to flush this one out more. I realized from some of the comments that I received that the graphic was probably too simplified for anyone who was not familiar with the subject to understand the scope of the issue. So with the idea of brushing up on my flash knowledge, I decided to turn this into an interactive graphic. I like this concept of an infographic that can be explored deeper. This is what I have come up with so far. I am working to add some pictures and other features to make the idea even clearer. Keep posted.

Click here to view fullsize.

BaseNow comes up with a thoughtfully redesigned image for NASA.

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.

If you have anything questions you would like visualized, please let me know in the comments!

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.

Will more people take the stairs if they act as a giant piano? Will more people use public recycling bins if it also becomes an arcade game? Fun Theory shows that you can make the world better and have more fun at the same time.

Abigail Uhteg brings us through the process of handmaking her own book in this delightful stop-motion video and reminds us how much thought can go into a process that we rarely stop to think about.

Understanding why it takes so long to produce and distribute vaccines on a national level.

2. How different risk factors, demographics, and diseases correlate to each other:

3. The chances of that you will get a certain disease:

Some typography posters I made last year for the Ivy Film Festival.

Additionally, I’ve finally got around to updating and documenting my projects with sketches and final product pictures. I think I did a pretty good job with just my desk lamp and floor. I really need to take some professional photography classes…

Darren Firth. Modern swiss style design at its best.

]]> http://www.dualaesthetic.com/2009/11/17/darren-firth/feed/ 0 http://www.dualaesthetic.com/2009/11/15/make-something-cool-everyday/ http://www.dualaesthetic.com/2009/11/15/make-something-cool-everyday/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:41:55 +0000 norris http://www.dualaesthetic.com/?p=401

Art that speaks to the subconscious.

Definitely one of the most intriguing items to come out of the 80′s were the Choose Your Own Adventure books. As tacky as they were, it was a very interesting effort to make books more “interactive.”As a kid, they offered countless hours of entertainment. I would read them over and over again so that I could figure out every possible ending. Recently, Christian Swineheart put together a very elegant visualization and analysis of the beloved CYOA books.

Statistics can be boring. It’s crucial that we have them in news articles to put facts behind the story but I always though reciting numbers in a paragraph is such a waste. Statistical data takes a lot of work to generate but when you just list the numbers, it’s a bore to readers who view the data more as a necessity than part of the story. The New York Times shows us again that the numbers themselves can be the story.

Update: Find how people like you have been affected by the recession.

I didn’t know a lot of the details yet on why meat-consumption was bad but there were a couple of things I did learn. I knew that one of the major causes of deforestation of the Amazon was to clear land for soy crops – most of which was used as animal feed for the beef industry in China. I learned that it took roughly 1,500 gallons of water, indirectly, to produce one pound of beef – the numbers for other types of meat were much lower but still pretty shocking. I studied fertilizer usage for animal feed, how inefficient it was, and how much nitrogen pollution it caused in both our atmosphere and our water. Finally, I had also heard about the significant contributions of “cow farts and burps” to methane pollution. This one took a while for me to believe but I eventually heard about it from enough credible sources.

All of what I had discovered compelled me to learn more and research ways to alleviate these problems but an immediate solution I could act on was to eschew eating meat altogether. I thought would be a better idea to “do” now and “learn” later.

There were a couple reasons I gave to friends when they asked why I suddenly decided to stop eating meat. Mainly, meat was environmentally damaging. It also happened to be my first year cooking for myself and I had become very conscious about food in general. I explained that meat was messier to cook (premediated defrosting, concern about rawness, etc.), and more expensive to buy than vegetarian meals.

Through my experiences and readings, it took me less than a month to realize that many of my preconceptions were flawed or flat out wrong.

First off, being vegetarian was definitely not cheaper. After having learned about how much more energy and water it took to produce one calorie of meat compared to one calorie of plant-matter, I was astonished how much cheaper meat actually was. Secondly, while making vegetarian dishes was much more sanitary and less time-consuming (if you account for defrost time), it was definitely much harder to create flavorful and interesting dishes.

Thes problems, however, were minor. I didn’t mind spending a little more money to live a lifestyle that I believed was better for the world. Additionally, making interesting vegetarian dishes became a welcomed personal challenge to cook more creatively. The main problem was one I did not anticipate as much – food is as much social as it is nutritional or environmental and not being able to eat meat stunted that aspect.

I didn’t mind removing meat from my diet when I cooked for myself. For the most part, it was only part of my meal because I felt it should have be there. Growing up with a traditional chinese home-cooked diet, it would be absurd to see a a meal without any meat in it. However, when I started cooking for myself, I realized meat didn’t necessarily make the meal taste any better. It was when meat became something more than just nutritional input that it started to matter. Being a strict vegetarian meant that I could no longer share in on those conversations when my culinary friends tried a new delicious lamb chop recipe. It meant that I could no longer participate in the fun and humor that accompanied gorging down unhealthy amounts of foods at BBQ’s. It meant no more hot dogs at the ballpark. Worst of all, being someone who lives on trying new things, this severely limited my options to explore different types of food. These were all important components to who I was and I did know if I was willing to completely give up so many of my other values to accommodate this one value.

I admire those who can maintain a strict vegetarian diet for a cause but, in my search for answers, I was also beginning to realize that it was not necessary for my cause and perhaps even problematic. The more I learned about the environmental impact of meat industry, the more I realized it was from the “industry” part and not from the “meat” part.

For example, harmful aspect to meat production I mentioned was nitrogen pollution and deforestation associated with feeding animals. Again, sustainable farms that raise animals off the land and not from an artificial and industrialized food source don’t have this problem. If animal grazing is properly controlled, the food source naturally available from the land beneath the cows can be self-regenerating. I also speculate that the 1500 gallons of water required to make one pound of beef is less from what the cow drinks and more from watering the animal feed.

There are a lot of other reasons why meat consumption itself is not necessarily bad but there are people with more authority than myself to talk about it. The Carnivore’s Dilemma is a great article in the New York Times that just came out and sums up a lot about the overgeneralizations of meat production. Michael Pollan‘s writings are also a great resource.

I don’t restrict myself from meat exclusively anymore. I have no problem with it if the meat is sustainably produced. I allow myself to try the dishes I want to try at new restaurants and not restrict myself to “the” vegetarian dish – but I do try to eat more at restaurants with a more sustainable outlook. I won’t make my friends cook something special for me at dinner parties – or make them constantly uncomfortable that I don’t have enough to eat. I will enjoy BBQ’s the way they should be enjoyed. But ninety percent of the time, I still restrict myself to a vegetarian diet.

One might think, “Well, what about all you just said about how it’s the industry part and not the meat part? How will eating less meat affect how sustainably we produce meat in the world?” The solution surely seems to be more go local and sustainable than go vegetarian (or flexitarian). It’s true that it may make more sense if I concentrate my efforts on policy or activism to encourage more naturally grown meats such as cage-free poultry or free-range grass fed cows. However, there has been one argument against the sustainable movement that I could not ignore: the current human population and diet have been so dependent on industrialized farms that it would be impossible for us to live off of a more natural system.

Even if everyone wanted to eat more sustainable meat and we could convert all industrial farmland into sustainable farmland, there simply would not be enough supply for the demand. Sustainable farms will likely never be as efficient as monoculture farms or feedlots at producing food in terms of food per unit of land. Industrial farms may have sacrificed environmental friendliness but they do so to achieve a more streamlined and efficient production process.  Regardless of the fact that many of the cited environmental impacts are based on the industrialized meat market, meat is still a inherently inefficient source of calories due to how high up it sits on the food chain. Vegetables and grains will always be a more efficient source and, in order to make sustainable eating habits a reality for everyone and not just a luxury good, the world as a whole must learn to consume less meat.

After preemptively proclaiming that I would be a vegetarian, many  thought that the “regression” from vegetarianism to flexitarianism was a sign of weakness – and, in part, it was – but after understanding more about where our food comes from and what choices we have, I don’t see the decision as a compromise to my principles.

My personal diet was a first step, but there is still have a lot I want to learn and do. In January 2010, I will be traveling to Argentina to work on some sustainable farm initiatives in Patagonia and learn more about sustainable agriculture. I am also designing a series of infographics to qualify many of statements we might have heard about food and the environment. After all, as I have learned from this journey, knowledge is power.

Back Forty is a restaurant in New York that strives to provide local and sustainable meats. In this video, the chef, Shanna Pacifico, demonstrates how she tries to use every part of an animal in her cuisine. I have always been very fascinated in how different parts of animals turn into different types of food. I admire that she is so knowledgeable about the entire food process and not just the preparation. That is a quality all great chefs should have.

For those of you who always wanted to learn some biology but were intimidated, Learn.Genetics from the University of Utah is full of great educational multimedia. Go get your hands dirty!

Illustration submitted for cover art in a scientific journal. The illustration was based off of data from research conducted by a fellow graduate student in my research lab.

It is said that a good design/idea is often the simplest one – but they also have to be simple in implementation.

10/GUI is a proposal for a new type of human computer interface that has been getting a lot of publicity on design blogs recently. It offers a unique perspective on both the hardware and software of future computer interaction.

I think that it elegantly solves the problem of body/neck strain that would undoubtedly exist with minority report types of touch interfaces. I am not as convinced by the software solution even though it is creative. It seems that expose on Macs seems to solve all the problems that they present already. Luckily, the hardware and software proposals can easily be separated.

I also couldn’t help but think that that Apple’s recently released magic mouse is definite a step towards this direction.

I am starting this, one, because I feel that I have accumulated a large enough amount of knowledge and work worth sharing. My hope is that what I write, do, or observe can help to inspire you or make you think critically about something you have not thought about before.

Secondly, a fellow designer once told me that he would much rather do work for organizations that he believed would make this world a better place. This doesn’t mean that the organization had to save lives or have noble causes – of course, that helps a lot – but this also meant organizations that make the world a more interesting place. I started this blog because I wanted a place to collect and display all the things I find interesting. From this website, I hope you can learn what I think a better world might consist of. If you agree, or disagree, please leave your comments and perhaps we can have some interesting discussions. And if you like what I do and are interested in working with me, I would be more than happy to talk to you about it.

That’s it for now. Oh, and although this is official the first post, I thought I would start this site off with a little bit more to look at.

David McCandless is a “data and visual journalist” based in London. I think he makes some very compelling visualizations. More often than not, I see information designs that dress up the information but don’t particularly make a concept any clearer or easy to understand. McCandless has really done a great job to clearly illustrate a particular point with his work. I especially like his graphic about the safety of the HPV vaccine.

Wes Anderson is the master of set design (and awkward humor). I can’t wait until this comes out.

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.

Back in the days when I was a student at Brown, I always used to look forward to reading the Brown Daily Herald. One reason was because my friend, Dustin Foley, had his own daily column called “Enigma Twist.” Enigma Twist was ambitious project to come up with a new type of puzzle every day but somehow he pulled it off for my entire senior year.

Recently, Dustin has decided to make Enigma Twist into its own website. He asked me to help him to make a logo and I was eager to help. When sketching out ideas, I wanted to make something that would embody the attitude of his puzzles. The puzzles were really more about being fun and clever than looking fancy or professional. His puzzles and his website seemed to fit right in with the comic culture that seems to be evolving with today’s youth. Think dinosaur comics or xkcd.  I decided, instead of trying “professionalize” enigma twist, I should embrace this new interesting style.

If Enigma Twist is all about new and clever games, why not turn the logo into a puzzle itself?  The main logo is a simple solvable maze. I wanted to keep the look as do-it-yourself and retro as possible.

In case legibility was a concern, here was an alternate logo that could be used that incorporates the same style.

Initial Sketches

Final Sketches

It has always been said that the key to good typography is the ability to deftly design white space. Here’s some great examples of white space design in logos. This one also reminds me of my Enigma Twist logo. Sweet.

A primer by AIGA on graphic design and sustainability. It was a major issue at this year’s Better By Design Conference and here it is again. I’m really glad that the design community is embracing these ideals. I hope someday my work will revolved centrally around this theme.

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 to 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.

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 consistence presence in Hollywood has inspired many other film visuals such as those for Catch Me If You Can(2002) and Burn After Reading(2008).

I intensely studied Saul Bass’ use of color, typography, and minimalism in order to recreate the feel of his title sequences while creating my designs from scratch. 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”).

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.

Back in the days when I was a student at Brown, I always used to look forward to reading the Brown Daily Herald. One reason was because my friend, Dustin Foley, had his own daily column called “Enigma Twist.” Enigma Twist was ambitious project to come up with a new type of puzzle every day but somehow he pulled it off for my entire senior year.

Recently, Dustin has decided to make Enigma Twist into its own website. He asked me to help him to make a logo and I was eager to help. When sketching out ideas, I wanted to make something that would embody the attitude of his puzzles. The puzzles were really more about being fun and clever than looking fancy or professional. His puzzles and his website seemed to fit right in with the comic culture that seems to be evolving with today’s youth. Think dinosaur comics or xkcd.  I decided, instead of trying “professionalize” enigma twist, I should embrace this new interesting style.

If Enigma Twist is all about new and clever games, why not turn the logo into a puzzle itself? Here was the result.

The main logo is a simple solvable maze. I wanted to keep the look as do-it-yourself and retro as possible.

In case legibility was a concern, here was an alternate logo that could be used that incorporates the same style.

Also, check out Enigma Twist on Twitter for daily word puzzles.

I spent my entire weekend this week volunteering and sitting in at events for the Brown/RISD joint conference, A Better World by Design and, I have to say, I enjoyed every moment of it. Not often enough have I felt this sense of community where everybody was on the exact same page and here to discuss the same issues.

I love design but I often think about to utility of its service. It is so easy to get lost in the mess of commercial product design and feel that design only perpetuates this colossal consumer culture. Perhaps because I have drowned in this sentiment so often, it was invigorating to hear what inspired people and organizations had to say about what they were doing to help the world – from Project H’s redesign of the Hippo Roller to Ken Banks’ open-source FrontlineSMS project. In addition to specific projects, it was also simple refreshing to see and meet so many professionals and students that felt the same way I did about design and were compelled to change the status quo. It gave me hope for the future of design in our world.

Considering this was only the second year for the conference and many of my classmates were involved in putting it together, I feel very proud of how well it turned out. Congratulations!

A close friend from college begain a project this year entitled “Victeams.” Frustrated by the lack of publicly available crime data in his home country, Venezuela, he decided to tackle this problem with a creatively modern solution – to allow the people to submit their own crime reports. He is currently working on developing a website where victims of crime can submit their own crime reports and view the crime location, type, and time on a map. He hopes this will help burgeon the forming of grassroots crime-prevention groups around the nation.

I wanted to help contribute to his cause and decided to help design a logo that was both culturally sensitive and empowering. Focusing on the idea of  a “team” of victims, I drew a logo that showed power through numbers. The colors I choose are closely related to the colors of the flag of Venezuela. I wanted to also give the logo a warm and organic feel to welcome people to participate in this project.

The logo utilizes a slightly altered version of comfortaa customized to give it a more organic look.

I have often recalled this one moment in class and I think I have finally distilled how intricate this one bit of advice is. Intrigued by this discussion, I went to try and fully understand what Aristotle’s philosophy of design was. Unfortunately, a initial google search brought nothing up on the matter – Aristotle never did have a stance on visual design. After a little bit of research, the closest literature I could find on the matter was an essay that Aristotle wrote on literary aesthetics.

His essay Poetics was the first essay written on literary theory. In it, he defines art – in all its modes, be it song, dance, or poetry – as imitations of nature. In terms of poetry, he distinguishes between Comedies, Tragedies, and Epics. In this essay, he focuses on the mechanics of a tragedy. One particular feature that struck me in the context of design was the idea of Catharsis. Catharsis is the idea of an intense release of emotion or an emotional purging that should result after an audience views a tragedy. Likely, this was what my professor had been referring to and it was certainly an interesting stretch to view this in the context of the visual design of information.

To Aristotle, a tragedy composed of six parts: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Because tragedies are the imitations of the actions of men and not men themselves, the plot was considered “the soul of a tragedy.” Characters, therefore, came second to plot. This parallel can again be drawn to information design. A good design tells a story. The design of the data (or characters) is important but it is secondary to the design of the story the information tells. In this sense, information design at its best has a singular thesis or story; at its worst, it is a data dump with too many stories to comprehend or no story at all.

Here is another interesting quote from the essay:

Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long.

He uses this metaphor to understand the organization and magnitude of a plot but, again, there is a direct corollary to design. Design and detail of the information is important but it one has to be wary of that including unimportant details of the information can take away from the overall message of the picture. Removing too many details, however, can make the design boring and unconvincing.

How well all of this actually applies to all types of information design is hard to say but this was certainly an interesting and different perspective on design implying that designers should not only have a creative eye but a creative tongue as well. A good designer, then, can learn a lot from the art of good storytelling.

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:

A logo I designed for Basepear – a blog with a goal to bring news of the latest discoveries or breakthroughs in the field of systems biology.

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.

Our goal as the second team of iGEM at brown was not only to do well at the annual international genetically engineered machines competition at MIT but also to keep the team going. I designed this information booklet to gather interest in the Brown community for both the competition itself and the field of synthetic biology in general.

Front and back covers

About page

About synthetic biology page

About the team.

Michael Glassman, one of my classmates at Brown University, was interested in running for the presidential position in the Undergraduate Council of Students. In collaboration with fellow student, Pik-Shuen Fung, we defined a platform and designed the visuals for his winning campaign.

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.)