Brandon Dorn — Brandon Dorn

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Hey over there

I'm Brandon Dorn, a digital product designer at Viget, where I focus on information architecture, user research, and interaction design.

I’ve worked with Rotary International, The Nature Conservancy, Privia Medical Group, Volunteers of America, and other organizations to make their digital things more useful and usable.

I like to read, and books themselves have become my standard for product design. Seems to me a digital product should be as easy to handle and learn from as a good book: accessible, durable, self-contained, unobtrusive, words and images helping each other out, information presented in sequence with enough context, nice to look at for lengths of time, designed at a human scale. A vessel of generosity from author to reader.

As a designer, I take cues from the Bauhaus school of thought that emphasized close attention to form for the sake of content, prototyping early and often, and a practical familiarity with the methods and materials of production.

I live in Durham with my wife, BethAnne, and our scruffy dogger, Ani. Before moving to North Carolina I studied English Literature and Economics in Illinois, yet have mostly been influenced by LEGO instruction manuals and Shel Silverstein poems. Recently I’ve been working on a commentary on the abundant music of Sufjan Stevens. More on that soon.

Odds and Ends

Product Design Resources

April 2019
Usable, Beautiful, Good

Duke Ideate Conference, April 2019
Tech Ethics for the Rest of Us

Nova UX, November 2018
Mark Lombardi and The Moral Lives of Graphs

Eyeo Festival, June 2018
One Designer’s Response to Khoi Vinh’s Complaint

Medium, February 2018
Notes on a Concert Schedule

July 2017
Hanging Shelves from Scratch

April 2017
Shame the Confirmshamers

Viget blog, March 2017
On Shaping a Design Education

Viget blog, October 2015

Recommended Reading

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

For Bradbury, summer as a kid was a rite of passage, a tradition of confronting the wildness of the world with the courage and wonder of a kid. There’s more than nostalgia to the collection of stories, though. They are parables about what it means to grow up in a world that is bigger than we can know.
Essays and Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s essays are an ardent call to trust the intelligence of intuition, to think for oneself and test received wisdom against experience. For him, individual experience was something abundant and reliable yet finally mysterious. As he put it, “I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.”
The Gift by Lewis Hyde

If you ever find yourself asking the question, “Why art?” — why music, movies, paintings, photography, books, why listen to or look at these things, why make them — then you’re who Hyde wrote for. He shows why neither art nor the artist can ever be rightly valued by modern economics, a value system that so predominates our thinking, and why a different economics — the gift economy, based on generosity and goodwill — is the rightful domain of creativity.
Apology for Wonder by Sam Keen

Keen explicates the idea of wonder like a lepidopterist working with live specimens: carefully, deliberately, handling the subject without stifling or destroying it. He gives us a theory of wonder that leaves us open to the experience of it.
Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis

This is a novel that feels like it contains everything: the tension between what is known and what is believed, the journey of the soul as it discards its “faces” in order to live truly. It was Lewis’s last novel, and people didn’t really know what to make of it. He considered it his best. It’s hard to disagree.
Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilynne Chandler McEntyre

McEntyre begins her series of essays by showing how our language is analogous to our natural resources: how words require thoughtful use and care to preserve their vitality, how they have unique histories and can be used to hurt or heal. Each essay is a strategy for stewarding our language, framed by imperatives like "love words," "tell the truth," and ”play," all of which she presents with a candor that exhibits what it teaches.
New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Merton is careful to tell us that contemplation isn’t something we do as much as it is a way of life always available to us. He shows us that the contemplative life is a leisurely yet determined attentiveness to the life of God in ourselves and in the world — a vision that isn’t achieved, but embodied.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Not a lot happens on the surface of this ruminative novel. But for John Ames, an ailing pastor in rural Iowa writing letters to his late-begotten son, the celestial motions of his soul develop a plot of their own. Robinson’s unadorned, brilliant language glimmers with melancholy light that remains with you long after reading.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Carl Sandburg described this book as "A moving, crying pageant with wilderness strengths.” It is all of those things, a fugue across generations, a meditation on the moral grandeur of ordinary lives and the quest for dignity in a broken world.
Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte

Tufte is known for theorizing the work of data visualization — he would never claim to have started it — and his books distill centuries of discoveries and failures from a range of fields into workaday principles. Here he focuses on how evidence is used (and misused) to construct narrative graphics. The chapter on visual confections is worth its weight in gold.
Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi

Using mapmaking as a guiding metaphor, Turchi describes the writer's imaginative work by charting the connections between the verbal and visual arts. Like a good cartographer, he explains without oversimplifying, explores without getting lost.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Woolf had a genius intuition for the nuances and complexities of human relationships. Her characters are indelible, flesh and blood, rich with life. She explores the centrifugal force of each person’s idiosyncrasies and contradictions and relationships that hold them together.

Love language

The third-person omniscient, brick red, afternoon errands, unassuming generosity, the quiet heavy energy before a thunderstorm, the ozone air after a thunderstorm, the expression on people’s faces after they’re done smiling and return to their thoughts, stark minimalism and animal warmth in Scandinavian design, modesty, 20th c. Christian humanism, heathered fabric, hole-in-the-wall Mexican, courtesy, pocket knives, club sandwiches, New Criticism, foraging at used book stores, the Great Plains, coffee cake, Jesus' kindness, severity, and patience, curiosity cabinets, mid-90s Nickelodeon, dirty realism, magical realism, mumblecore realism, the original Sambas, Midwestern hip-hop, sparkling water, unself-conscious, jargon-laced strategies of self promotion (the kind you find on LinkedIn), moments of honesty and self-revelation in sterile, professional places, Mahler’s 5th and 3rd (in that order), when you’re waiting at a stoplight your turn signal and synchronizes with the song you're listening to, literary marginalia, the extras in Portlandia, folk wisdom, brunch dates, lists, bouldering, black matte finishes, shortbread cookies, normcore, the complicated characters of the Old Testament, hotel continental breakfasts, melancholy trap, accessible poetry, handwritten letters, Southern Gothic, non-holiday gift-giving, the idea of wonder, prairie women, essays, hand massages, cartography, ambiguity, people who listen wholeheartedly, midweight jackets, clever German compound words, October, coffee cake crumbles, manual hatchbacks, etc.