Hi, I’m Jon.

I’m a designer living in Bristol, UK, and founding member of the Analog co-operative where I work with some fantastic people. 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 OSCON 2009.

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.

Talks:

• 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:

• 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)

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.