Ian Tan

Ian Tan

Newsletter 49 – Going Bananas With Google

In this week’s newsletter, I bring you on a quick tour of Google’s new Gemini 3 for vibe-coding and the phenomenal Nano Banana Pro imaging engine. This key visual was generated by NBP within Google AI Studio, with an interesting…

Nano Banana Pro – ThinkTan Space Stations

In 2023, I spent several days crafting my company’s name “ThinkTan” but I barely spent five minutes designing the logo as I just needed a placeholder for my website. It’s also simple and clean when used as a letterhead. The…

Nano Banana Pro

Google has launched its latest imaging engine Nano Banana Pro in Gemini. Here’s the infographic about Heath and Heath’s “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas” which I teach in my courses. Holy moly!!! No spelling mistakes! Such pretty visuals! Great color…

Newsletter 48 – File everything

A professor told me recently that in today’s age, it’s more important to know where to find information than to memorise it, especially since our mind can only recall so much. I agreed with him, but a caveat is that…

NYJC visit to my school

I was asked to do a “mock lecture” for our student visitors from Nanyang Junior College who were keen to find out about life at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. However, I told the JC students…

The real value of writing

Many years ago, I knew a star reporter whose news stories often made the front page. What readers didn’t know was that this journalist was not a good writer – the sub-editors always had to rework the copy extensively. But…

Newsletter 47 – Enjoy Your Work

After conducting a Gen AI workshop this week with OCBC bank employees, a participant said to me, “Your course is different from other courses, you teach it in quite a playful manner.” I said, “That’s because I really enjoy learning…

From PPT mockup to AI App

VISUALISING YOUR AI APP: For over 20 years, I’ve been doing simple visual mockups in PowerPoint to show colleagues and clients my creative ideas, marketing event setups, e-commerce website designs, and many more things. Today, I use the same approach…

Gen AI Is Just Guessing – an app I made

I’m always surprised that in 2025, many people are still unaware that Gen AI generates text by predicting the next probable word (which is why you cannot fully trust AI, since it is just guessing). For my Gen AI workshops,…