Hi, I’m Jon.
There is one 陳 Tan here (me) and I like to eat tangerines. When first thinking about life–long domains this one made me smile. Soon after, a respected colleague remembered it long enough to add me to his IM, after accidentally refusing my request. Thus jon tangerine dot com.
Fresh tangerines may be available soon, but until then this is merely a personal log, knowledge silo and sandbox.
I’m a designer and father of two boys living in sunny Bristol, UK. Originally brought up in the not–so–sunny, but equally loved Stoke–on–Trent, I took a rather circuitous route to Bristol via Singapore, The Seychelles (map 1, 2), London and Sydney.
Half of my genes are from Singaporean–born Chinese stock, the other half from the UK. So I'm a hybrid, and regularly dip my toe in both ponds and feel a quiet sense of pride in each.
When not working, I entertain, enrage and encourage my sons, who apart from being an order of magnitude more creative than I, are also the best spiritual sustenance and exercise regime I could ever wish for.
I first started designing with Lego. I still think it’s still the best metaphor for what I do today. From dabbling in print design using plate and press in 1992, I moved to digital design around 1995. A jack of all trades and master of none, the tension between artistic creativity, pedantic precision and wanderlust has characterised everything I’ve done, finally finding a perfect home in interface and information design today. Along the way I've worked as a marketing director, octopus fisherman, professional DJ, market stall trader and information and statistics analyst.
Today I mostly convert pixels to ems and wish for just one more decimal place of precision and consistent rounding in Web browsers.
I’ve definitely not been bored; I hope the same can be said for you after graciously taking time to read this.
All the best,
Sunday, 11th March, 2007.
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Jon Tan is the founding member and lead designer for Grow Collective, a Web design, development and consulting co-operative in Bristol, UK.
An advocate of web standards, Jon also has a special interest in user centred design, semantic information design ethics (SIDE), accessibility and Microformats.
His work has featured in magazines like .NET, and on numerous design galleries including the CSS Zen Garden. Three of his sites were nominated in three different categories in the CSS World Awards 2006 with two featuring as finalists. More recently, his work also featured in the Web Design Index (Pepin Press) and The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design (SitePoint).
Professional associations:
The design grew out of thoughts on Western type and print versus Chinese typography and calligraphy. A balanced elastic interface seemed to fit, so everything stretches including content images. In fact, there are no presentational or background images at all, only content. You could call it an attempt at pure information design. It’s the same ethic that makes Chinese calligraphy decorative, but simple and articulate, and lets all newspapers have a beauty all of their own, just from the anatomy of the type.
Depending on your platform, Baskerville or Palatino Linotype are used for headers and incidental text, Georgia for the body. Times New Roman is used for the stacked decorative type in the index masthead. For those lucky enough to be viewing this on a Mac, you may even notice the rare appearance of an italic Cochin.
The content is managed using a home-rolled blog application built in PHP called Lifelong File. Credit goes to Paul Whitrow for the initial work, but particularly to Jon Gibbins, who’s tireless work behind the scenes has qualified him for the “Free Cider At My House Award” for 2007–8. Jon is also responsible for the extracts of my del.icio.us bookmarks, Twitter moments and Upcoming events using a modified version of MagpieRSS rather than the APIs.
Plain old semantic HTML wraps all the information you see with CSS used for style. Microformats such as hAtom, hCalendar, XFN, hCard and rel-tag feature heavily around the site.
Other features close to my heart are also planned, from weighty tomes like OpenID support to Mills and Boon fun stuff like Gravatars. Now I’ve said it, it has to happen! Thanks for reading.
Fertigo included with @font-face. Great example of usage, but syntactically broken when images and styles are disabled.
Beautiful, incredible painting. Never has white space been so well used, or precision and perspective used so well to turn objects into icons.
From a self-confessed lover of Photoshop, Francesco Mugnai. Fifty links to resources and counting.
Clip groups restored. Equanimity restored. On with the iPhone interface wassnot.
Coda hung on file transfer. Had to force quit. All the created and populated clip groups are gone. Arse. Reminds me of Adobe.
Thanks for the Coda replies, guys! It seems fine after a restart and an office connection. @rickhurst TextMate for camel case fall-back! :)
30 Aug 2008
Ashton Court, Bristol
13 Sep 2008
Invention Studios, Bath
19 Sep 2008
London Metropolitan University Graduate Centre, London
Work with me via ~ ~ a creative consortium.
This simple dish was created with a little xHTML, a dash of CSS and a pinch of PHP. It’s garnished with hAtom, hCalendar, XFN, hCard and rel-tag with a large slice of accessible intent. Hopefully it plays nicely, all the time.
