Hello! I’m Jag Talon. (He/him) I’m working at DuckDuckGo (since 2014) to help show the world that privacy is simple. I started as a frontend developer at first, but now I’m working as a full-time product designer.
I write on this blog, but I also have small, personal updates in HEY World (closest thing I have to Twitter), and you can e-mail me at [email protected] as well if you’d like to say hi or if you have any feedback. I enjoy getting e-mail.
How to subscribe: If you’d like to subscribe to my posts, you can use tools like Feedbin (web), BazQux (web), NetNewsWire (macOS and iOS), etc. Just plug in the links and you’re good to go:
https://jagtalon.com/feed/https://world.hey.com/jag.talon/feed.atom
Here are my other accounts around the web: Sourcehut, Dribbble, GitHub, OpenStreetMap.
Personal Projects
Friends Talk Frontend Podcast (2017)
I ran a frontend-focused podcast called Friends Talk Frontend (iTunes) with my buddy Katherine in the past. It’s where we got to talk to amazing people about their habits, how they got to where they are now, and what their day-to-day life was like. It still blows my mind that I got to talk to people that I look up to online!
Speaking of podcasts, I was also lucky enough to be interviewed on the Codepen Podcast about work and how I got myself into CSS.
Generative Art (2020-)
I’ve been learning about using code to create art recently, and I’m absolutely enjoying it. It fascinates me that a set of rules could create something artistic. It’s also very satisfying for me to see my work on my walls in the real world.
You can find my work on a dedicated generative art page, and some of them are even for sale on Etsy.
Web Animation Tutorials (2016)
Before I started the Friends Talk Frontend podcast, I had tutorial screencasts on YouTube. I was all about animations on the web at that time, so I thought I’d be fun to show people that it’s super easy to get started on CSS Animations and the Web Animations API.
During this time, I also recreated different loading animations from products like Slack, Asana, and iMessage. I wanted to see if I could try and get my own web-based imitation to look as close to the real thing as possible. (I wrote about it in Tiny Animations, too.)
Work Projects
Embedded Facebook Blocking (2021)
I designed a feature that blocks Facebook’s embedded content on websites. That can either be embedded comments, videos, posts, groups, pages, and logins. This limits the amount of data that Facebook can gather from you. I created a lot of design variations for this project, but we ultimately landed on a simple, unobtrusive version that you see above. (Blog Post)
Brand Guidelines (2020)
I worked on the design of the initial company brand book. I worked on the layout and organization of the book, but the content was a multi-person effort. The book was laid out in Figma, and it covered topics such as brand identity, logo design, typography, color, and brand usage guides.
Extension Redesign (2020)
We redesigned the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension on Chromium-based browsers and Firefox to improve comprehension and hierarchy. We also worked on supporting dark mode! You can find this on Dribbble as well.
Homepage Redesign (2020)
We worked with Matt Anderson to create this homepage variant for DuckDuckGo. Desktop background is from Unsplash, the desktop mockups from Facebook Design, and the Safari mockup is from the Figma Community. This is also on Dribbble.
Report Broken Site (2020)
When things break on iOS, iPadOS, Android, and our browser extensions, you’ll run into this report form that we made. These types of forms are often tedious and boring, so we made sure to make the form easy to fill out and paired it with an illustration from Matt Anderson. I made This is also on Dribbble.
Privacy Heroes (2018)
We partnered with ProtonMail, Brave, Tresorit, and Threema to create this page to accompany our ad on EasyJet. I designed and implemented the page, and the illustrations are from Matt Anderson. I also snuck in tiny SVG animations on the page.
DuckDuckGo Blog (2018)
We’re running Ghost.org for the company blog, and I worked on modifying the default theme to match our style and branding.
Instant Answers Maintainer (2014)
I was one of the core maintainers of duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice and duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies where I helped improve and review open source contributions to DuckDuckGo. These Instant Answers are written in Perl, JavaScript, and CSS.