Hello, World.
My name is Burton Rast, and I'm a design leader, mentor, artist, investor, and public speaker. I'm passionate about designing and building in new ways, with new technologies. With this in mind, here are a number of things I've recently created:
- My AI-Powered Localization workflow automates translation and narration across 106 languages, as implemented throughout this site.
- The Tantara Attractor is a novel strange attractor I designed to model the interplay between creative tension, logic, and paradigm shifts.
- Material Icons AI Browser is a fast, AI-first natural language interface for browsing Google's 4,000+ Material Design Icons. The collection automatically syncs with new icon releases.
- The Next Four Years is the world's first novel that uses AI to rewrite itself every day per the 24-hour news cycle. (Project detail here)
- Lightroom Coach is a natural language AI teaching assistant I built into Adobe Lightroom. The plug-in uses Nano Banana Pro to analyze photos and automate edits, then explains each adjustment to help users understand and learn from the changes.
- The Anti-AI Writing Guide is a pattern-based guide for producing natural, authentic text without common AI linguistic tells. The guide updates itself daily via the Claude API per Wikipedia's oft-edited Signs of AI Writing article.
- PRD Builder allows you to visually build Product Requirements Documents for use in AI chatbots and vibe coding tools. Nothing is stored on the server, all data is local and private.
- Strange Sessions is a series of beautifully morphing strange attractors that I made to promote our company's recently launched speaker series.
- Markdown Converter is a web app that converts popular document formats into markdown format for use in AI chatbots. The app is 100% private and local, your files never leave your device.
- Noise to Signal is a Chrome extension that uses AI to analyze all of the posts in my LinkedIn feed and flags any that are overly self-aggrandizing, spammy, or AI slop.
- Invading Space is a remix of the classic Space Invaders where you're the aliens trying to blow up the cannons and invade the earth.
Built on a custom design system, this site automatically generates AI-ready mirrors of every page via a workflow I designed.
For more than a decade, I've been honored to lecture at conferences, companies, and universities, both home and abroad, about my work, my story, and the philosophies that inform my identity as a designer and leader. I am represented by Luminary and Chartwell Speakers.
I'm also a tireless creator of unintentionally moody imagery. My photographs have been featured by Apple, NBC, PetaPixel, Fstoppers, designboom, Cult of Mac, and CNN, among others.
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For curiosities and conversations, feel free to reach out via the below links.