About 陳 Jon Tan

Professionally…

Asides

Twitter moments.
Flickr tableaus.
Del.icio.us bookmarks.
LinkedIn network.

Browse extracts →

I’m a designer living in Bristol, UK, and founding member of the Analog co-operative where I work with some fantastic people doing things like the upcoming Brooklyn Beta conference and running the Mild Bunch HQ. I’m also the co-founder of web fonts service, Fontdeck. I currently serve on the Experts Panel for Smashing Magazine, and I’m sometimes lucky enough to write for other design publications, and speak at industry conferences — most recently at the Ulster Festival of Art and Design in Belfast.

I’m also fortunate to be a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers. My work has featured in Fluid Web Tyography (New Riders), The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design (SitePoint), and the Web Design Index (Pepin Press); in magazines like .Net, Smashing Mag, and A List Apart, and countless design galleries including the venerable CSS Zen Garden.

For a more human perspective read my personal note or Seven Things log entry.

Upcoming talks:

New Adventures in Web Design, 11 January, 2011, Nottingham, UK.

Why web typography doesn’t have to suck with Rich Rutter — ATypI 2010, 8–12 September, 2010.

Previous talks:

Talking Typography — Ulster Festival of Art & Design, June, 2010.

First Things First — Bathcamp, Bath, UK. March, 2010.

Grokkin’ Design — OSCON ’09, San Jose, California.

Quit bitchin’ and get your glyph on! — SxSW ’09, Austin, Texas.

80% science, 20% art — SkillSwap Brighton, 2009.

Experience-driven development — OSCON ’08, Portland, Oregon.

Books:

Editor, Smashing Book, typography chapter.

Articles and interviews:

8 Faces magazine, issue 1, July 2010 — interview

Inaugural podcast — Pique Web, May, 2010.

A festive type folly — 24 Ways, December, 2008.

Professional associations:

International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD)

Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS)

Association Typographique Internationale (atypi)

Society of Typographic Aficionados (S{o}TA)

Personally…

I’m a husband 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, and market stall trader.

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, 11^th March, 2007.

Contact

Download my vCard* (via X2V):

*If viewing with Internet Explorer you will not see the image in the vCard. IE does not support base64 encoding that enables it to be displayed.

Name:

Jon Tan

Photo:

Email:

jon@jontangerine.com

URL:

http://jontangerine.com

IMs:

Skype: jontangerine
Yahoo: jontangerine

Colophon

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.

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.