Interview about Talbica Interactive Periodic Table, winner of the A' Website and Web Design Awards 2023
Talbica is a reinvention of the Periodic table. More than 60 properties are provided for each element with rich infographics and neat typography. Users can see animated atomic models, molecular radius scheme, crystal structures and temperature ranges. Heat Maps is a tool for data visualization. Users can see distribution of properties along the table with colorful gradient maps. A hi-res photo is provided for 90 elements. Thousands of compounds are represented with 3D molecules. Talbica also features a photo-mode with beautiful space animation on background.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe project began as a very simple application for Windows 98/XP, and provided a bare minimum of elements properties, a solubility table and a simplest version of reactions balancer. Of course, it had no such great visualization tools as Heat Maps, and the balancer worked extremely slow. In fact, it worked in such a primitive way that couldn't even insert the found coefficients into the reaction and showed them as numbers in a separate field. The second version was better but conceptually stayed the same. Then I abandoned the project for some time because I didn't have enough experience to implement the vision that I had. Only in 2022 I managed to implement everything that I had in my mind. Well, not everything, actually. There's much more to come.
Ideas were coming to my mind during work. In fact, I skipped most of the design and immediately started to code. This is what happens when you can do both design and development: the visual part can be omitted and you can design directly by coding. In the end, it is this approach what led to many features such as Heat Maps and Atomic Models. I didn't think what I could design. Instead, I thought about what could I achieve by code.
I was a keen chemist in school, however I was mostly interested in the inorganic chemistry. When the organic chemistry began, I slightly lost my track in this science. However, by that time parents bought me a first computer, and I swiftly learnt how to code. Then I got this idea to combine my best knowledge in chemistry and programming and bring something interesting to this world. Today, I cannot consider myself a good chemist. However, I'm not a bad physicist, and I even have a certificate from Stanford University for the relativity theory course completion.
As I mentioned before, I skipped most of the design and started coding many features right away. When I was writing a function for displaying chemical properties, I saw an opportunity to use some of the numbers for generating element's colors. I already had a color palette of the elements, and I had displayed melting points, densities, etc. They were two nearest blocks of code, so I came up with an idea to tie them together. The funniest part is that designing such a mockup in Figma would have taken several days, while coding it took only a couple of hours.
The scientific community is great! It is open and collaborative. Researchers from all over the world share their knowledge and data. This resulted in such open projects as PubChem, a US's National chemistry research library. They provide information about thousands of substances. The only thing I needed to do is to filter out too rare and complex substances, and I did it by different tricks such as measuring the length, complexity index, and mass of the compounds.
This background animation of a space travel I imagined long time ago, somewhat in 2010's. I dreamed about making it alive. I get the first inspiration by looking at the space photos used for Mac OS wallpapers back then. One day I thought they were ideal for a Periodic Table. It is highly connected with the space. Initially, right after the Big Bang, our Universe consisted of only Hydrogen and Helium. Then due to the nuclear processes in stars, they evolved into other elements. In the end, we're all from the space, you know!
As I mentioned before, this symbiosis allowed me to design by coding. I saved a lot of time doing this, because such features as Heat Maps require a lot of time to build in Figma. Just imagine working on the color palettes, making components for 118 elements, manually checking melting points and picking up right colors for every element. This could have taken days! However, when you already have numeric data, it's as simple as write a single function to generate colors. It took me a couple of hours to come by.
I have a friend who is a professional chemist, and it was his idea to digitize chemical reactions. He told me that such software simply doesn't exist and he uses a dusty reference book from 1990's, the only source of such information. I didn't believe him, tried to google and, to my amazement, failed. Thus, my friend was the first customer and I interviewed him about the use cases. In the same fashion, I later interviewed other chemists and now I'm working on a new version of Talbica which considers all collected feedback.
I believe Talbica would become a great educational software. Today's chemistry classes in school lack visualization and feedback, and this is why it's so hard to study. Only a limited number of schools in big cities can allow having a chemical laboratory and demonstrate elements, compounds and reactions in vitro. I'm trying to eliminate this gap. Currently, I'm working on a new version that will lead the immersive experience to another dimension.
You probably remember how difficult chemistry was in school. In my class, only 3 people understood it. And this wasn't a fault of the teacher or students! Chemistry operate with abstract formulas, such as H2O and C2H5OH. Many people cannot comprehend things if they cannot see them alive, touch them, get a feedback and understand their purpose. This is the direction I'm working in: eliminating these gaps, trying to make chemistry something real, tangible, and attractive. I believe Talbica and its visualization tools can help students to feel this science, and therefore understand it better.
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