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".

Dan has participated in nearly every IA Summit since its inception in 2000. His participation included moderating a panel on enterprise information architecture, leading a workshop on Microsoft Visio, presenting a poster on wireframing, and sitting on a panel on Web 2.0. He's 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. He's also written for UX Matters, the CHI Bulletin, and Interactive Television Today. Review Dan's extensive list of publications.

In October 2006, Dan led three workshops for the Nielsen-Norman Group's User Experience conference. These day-long workshops dealt with introducing information architecture, improving user experience documentation, and employing lightweight content management solutions to address business problems. Nearly two hundred people attended these sessions and their evaluations were extremely positive:

• Excellent class, great exercises.
• Fun and informative.
• Wonderful!!! Interesting content and engaging speaker.
• Absolutely great, as expected.
• Dan has a great delivery and a good sense of humor.
• Great help and inspiration.
• Great speaker with lots of interaction, he was very willing to talk through tough ideas and questions.

Dan is very active in the local Washington, DC information architecture community, organizing regular workshops and bimonthly reading groups. He lives in Bethesda, MD in a newly renovated 1922 bungalow with his wife, baby son, and many, many pets.