Dan Brown

Dan Brown is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC that has engaged with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech, and other sectors. Dan has been practicing information architecture and user experience design since 1995.

Prior to founding EightShapes, Dan consulted with organizations ranging from the US Postal Service, the World Bank, and the Federal Communications Commission to USAirways, FirstUSA, and Fannie Mae. From 2002-2004, Dan was a Federal employee, leading the content management program for the Transportation Security Administration. His portfolio includes work on public-facing web sites, intranets and extranets, and addresses most aspects of the user experience, from information architecture and content strategy to interaction and interface design.

Drawing on his expertise in communicating complex ideas and abstractions through high-quality visual documentation, Dan wrote a book on user experience deliverables – Communicating Design (New Riders, 2006). Amazon reviews call it “authoritative”, “practical, personal, comprehensive” and “a cool nerdbook”. He has written more than a dozen articles for Boxes and Arrows, an online journal dedicated to information architecture, on topics ranging from PowerPoint to the information architecture of home audio devices.

Dan has conducted seminars and workshops for most major user experience conferences, including the IA Summit, Interaction, An Event Apart, Nielsen-Norman Group, and Jared Spool’s Web App Summit. Most recently, Dan taught a workshop on using diagrams to plan web sites at the School of Visual Arts for the Interaction Design Program.

Having earned a bachelors in Philosophy from Wesleyan University well before the web was mainstream, Dan attempts to reference Plato as often as possible in his design work.

You can follow Dan on Twitter. (Follow @uxdeliverables for information about Communicating Design and the upcoming second edition.)