About Command+Tab

You don't need to be an expert to come up with great ideas. The best ones often come from the intersection of topics that don't typically belong together.

Take photography and data visualization. Composition techniques from photography—how you direct the eye, where you place emphasis—can translate directly into building dashboards that guide users to what matters most.

This blog is an expansion of that idea. Welcome to Command+Tab.

For the Mac users here, you might know Cmd+Tab as the shortcut to switch between applications (Alt+Tab on Windows). Here, TAB stands for Technology, Art, and Business, the lenses I use on this site, and the intersection I'd like to explore with you.

Those intersections matter more than we give them credit for. A dashboard nobody uses isn't an asset, but a waste of time. A well-designed product that can't survive a business case doesn't get built. Most of the time, the gap isn't technical skill. It's the failure to bring the right people and ideas together.

The Intersection: Cross-disciplinary essays on where technology, art, and business meet. The connections aren't always obvious — until they are.

In Practice: Shorter, practical takes on tools and techniques, including data visualization.

Hi, I'm Devon. I work in business intelligence and analytics, and I teach Human-Centered Design. The combination sounds odd until it doesn't: both start with understanding people before building anything for them.

I started Command+Tab to think out loud across all of it. If something here changes how you approach a problem, that's the goal.