Bret Victor

purveyor of impossible dreams

• Bio
• CV

Things I'm Thinking About, aka “Research”

Tools and techniques for reducing abstraction and indirection.
Encouraging people to understand and create via exploration and intuition.

Dynamic Pictures

• Dynamic Pictures: Why do we make pictures by writing code? How can artists draw data graphics, visual interfaces, and other pictures that change?
• Magic Ink: A treatise on a new approach to UI design. Interaction considered harmful.
• Substroke: Sketch of a dynamic drawing language.

Explorable Explanations

• Explorable Explanations: What is active reading? How can readers ask questions, explore scenarios, and change assumptions?
• Tangle: JavaScript library for authoring reactive documents.
• Ten Brighter Ideas: Explore energy conservation scenarios.
• Scientific Communication: As sequential art.

Kill Math

• Kill Math: Why do we model the world using abstractions invented for pencil and paper? Can we solve quantitative problems without manipulating symbols?
• The Ladder of Abstraction: A systematic approach to interactive visualization.
• Interactive Exploration of a Dynamical System: See everything, touch anything.
• Scrubbing Calculator: Scrub your numbers. Algebra without symbolic variables.
• Simulation as a Practical Tool: Model, simulate, visualize.

Serious Business

I made these things to provoke and inspire you.

Major Projects

• Our Choice: (2010) Infographics redefined. A multimedia edition of Al Gore's book on climate change. I designed the interactive infographics.
• Apple: (2007-2010) Inventin' shit.
• Substroke: (2007) Towards a dynamic drawing language.
• ClickShirt: (2006) New frontiers in t-shirt design. ClickShirt was an online drawing tool with an unusually smooth and simple UI. Click to visit.
• Magic Ink: (2006) Interaction considered harmful.
• BART Widget: (2005) Train schedules, novel UI.
• bkasm: (2004) Fancy DSP assembler.
• Alesis Ion, Micron, Fusion: (2003-2005) Music machines.
• Crosstalk Coding: (2001) Bus encoding to prevent crosstalk delay.

Nice Ideas

• Interactive Library: Discover, browse, play. A prototype of a site to browse and play interactive fiction. Click to visit.
• Resistor Decoder: Chart beats software.
• Trip Phrases: Pay attention to what people pay attention to.
• Alligator Eggs: Lambda calculus for 8-year-olds.
• Households How to design an interactive infographic.
• Visualizing Graph Edge Weights Keep the hot path hot.
• Inline Spellcheck: Knock 'em down.
• Zoom and Pan: Navigate without thinking.
• Scrolltabs: Browser tabs merged into the scrollbar.
• Tom Oreb: Art analysis as comic.

Ancient History

• IIgs software
• Caltech projects
• research papers

“Art” / Fun / Whatever

I made these things to make someone smile.

Electric

• Trampoline
• Grim Sweeper
• Various Other Gadgets

Words & Pictures

• Saltwater: Unfinished animation for The Saltwater Room by Owl City.
• Emilia Fanart for Digital: A Love Story by Christine Love. Go play it.
• Albatross
• Lipograms
• Adjectives
• Home Is All The Choices On The Way
• Freedom
• Departure

Shirts

• Shirts 2009
• Shirts 2007
• QATees

Flyers

• Favorite Things
• Unicorns
• Crows
• Whales
• Music

Desktops

• Higher Learning:
• Background
• Wish
• Hope
• Life

Older

• Telephobia
• Job Search
• Goodbye Room
• Turtles

Archae- ology

• Website 2007
• Website 2001
• Website Deluxe

Oatmeal

• Side Effects
• This Town: music by zefrank, words by cadydidwhat, pictures by worrydream
• Gogh Away
• What Hump
• Are You The Police
• Absolute
• Gendermail
• Portland
• Invitation1
• Invitation2
• Craigslist
• I made some friends.
• Alone
• Firmware
• Dung
• Nametag
• Thermometer
• Panda
• Hearing Ade
• Ducky Go Quack
• BDD
• Caltech Girl

Other people made these things

And I'm glad they did.

• Links
• Quotes

Contact

• updates via that thing
• updates via rss
• put words in my face