Dan Tylkowski
{Programmer & Designer}
All my professional life I have worked and played on the web. I have realized that users need an online experience that grabs their attention and keeps them engaged. With a team of innovators, I have helped tell over 200 hundred interactive stories for the Webby nominated online magazine FLYP and for clients when we later changed our name to Zemi Media. I am an incredibly accomplished storyteller with both the creative and technical knowledge about how to use the various media available to the web.
At FLYP, we spent two and a half years developing a storytelling style unique to the web, layering content across different media so that nothing was lost and the information was a pleasure to explore. Since we only had to please ourselves, it was a great time to experiment and learn.
While doing client work for Zemi, we had to step up our game, wow the client. The team got leaner and had to learn to work more quickly while continuing to push the technology. Since the client had the final say on content and layout, we also learned how to design and integrate stories in a way that was reusable, modular and made it easy to quickly change and move content.
Résumé
Interactive Projects
How Much Is Left?
This article began as one long, multipage infographic, and my team adapted it into a Flash interactive. More importantly, we achieved our biggest goal: Figuring out an elegant way to fit all the content into one flowing experience.
See at Scientific American
When the Sea Saved Humanity
With such gorgeous photography and interesting information, it was hard to choose what to sacrifice and what to highlight. Luckily the power of the web allowed us to let the user decide. We used drawers to hold the main text and video buttons so that, with a click, the text could be hidden away, revealing the images. When we had a photo too wide for the screen, we made sure the user could see the entire panorama with the flick of a mouse.
See at Scientific American
C-Suites: Cleveland Clinic
It's not impossible to cram lots of infographics, text, audio, and video into a tiny space, and my colleagues and I achieved that here. The end product doesn't feel crowded and is easy and rewarding to navigate.
See at Fortune
Hungry Like a Wolf
We had so much excellent, entertaining content here that we figured out multiple ways in which to display the media. There's a rotating timeline, a spread that slides, a jukebox, a multilayered interactive map and much more in a single article. This was one of the most popular articles we created.
See at Latina
Institutional Investor 2011 Media Kit
For this project, a design partner of mine figured out how to pack a ton of information into a small space, and I took it from there, creating the usability and navigation. Together we created and employed a great system of communication for designing, coding, and integrating a large article in a flexible and efficient manner. We've gone on to perfect the system: We can now quickly put together large mini sites.
(Institutional Investor has yet to publish their new site.)
Institutional Investor
To Land Among The Stars
For this project I aimed to push the interactivity and layering of information. The result was an infographic that was a joy to consume (if I do say so myself).
See at FLYP
Print Projects
Two Drink Minimum
Right after college, two of my fellow classmates and I founded a stand-up comedy magazine called Uproar magazine. It went through several rebirths, including a title that changed from Uproar to Two Drink Minimum, and a switch from web to print. Through this project, I learned how to manage both a website and a print magazine. Nothing like trial by fire when you're an upstart! I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
See Issue 16 [PDF]
MSA Films Winter 2003 Calendar
I love movies and comic books — especially work by Mike Allred, David Lynch, Warren Ellis and Robert Altman. For this project, I worked with an illustrator to create a schedule of movies with a short superhero plot line. I also researched production methods from old comics in order to come up with the color palette, using only colors that were available to artists in the golden age of cinema.
See calendar [PDF]
Hoochfest
Much like working advertising, creating promos for parties in college calls for the utmost creativity, and I was given free rein to flex my design muscles with these posters for the University of Missouri's storied "Hoochfest" parties. Each year, I took pictures of the hosts and designed a series of posters based on a new theme. I like to think that the turnout, which grew larger each year I was in school, had something to do with my work.
See Hooch '99 poster [JPG]
See Hooch '00 poster [JPG]
See Hooch '01 poster [JPG]
