Thoughts on Digital Life

My career has been a strange path so far, but it has certainly been quite a nice ride. Yet again, I'm changing the scenery and I decided to explain a little bit on the why. The snippet-resumé My resumé, or CV if you will, has become quite ridiculous. I've got loads of short-term employments on it over the past 6 years, ranging from two years to 9 months. And that sucks. Big time. When I started my career I worked at a place where I could have worked forever - until they went bankrupt... I've been in that same situation once again since. Both of these employers could have been my employers for my entire career if the finances didn't go bad. I've often changed jobs. Sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Once there was a mutual agreement that things didn't work out - that company was mostly copying great work by others and that didn't compute with me. And once have I been fired because I was too critical of the company

Here we go, the final installment of my summer blogs. I started 5 weeks ago blogging about colors, moving into typography, shapes, pictures and finally here we are at motion. Motion Webdesign has changed a lot since I started almost 20 years ago. In the very beginning we had frames, then we moved to Shockwave, making our way from Flash to HTML5 with CSS. It has become this responsive thing as well. Actually I feel it has matured. Looking at my design studies I am now using more knowledge from design as I did before. Since Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash motion has really become a part of webdesign. During these Flash days anything was okay. We didn't care about the filesize, loading times and all that kind of stuff. It had to look amazing. Actually now, we're there again - yet more matured. No longer do we animate for the sake of animating, we can now have it help our visitors. Guiding through the website Both small and big animations help guide a visitor throug

Part 4 of my summer blogs on visual design: pictures. Pictures to me are photographs, but also infographics, video and such. Because photography is the biggest thing related to pictures, my focus will mainly be the photography. Emotion A photograph captures emotion. Many of the pictures we know well capture an emotion. During my research the picture below appeared to be the most famous photo. I always thought it would be the lunchtime on a skyscraper (Charles C. Ebbets, 1932) or the napalm attack (Nick Ut, 1972) - but it appears to be this picture of an Afghan girl by Steve McCurry taken in 1985. Before you read below the image, picture an emotion with this photo and then read on to find out if it was captured as you felt it was. This is Sharbat Gula, 13 years old at the time of the picture. Her parents had died in the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan and she was living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Doesn't matter if you got it right or not - you can most certainly

This is the third part of my summer blogs on Visual (Web)Design. After looking at colors and fonts we're diving into shapes. What are shapes? When I'm talking about shapes I'm actually talking about a lot of things. Most notably I try to look at the branding. A visual guideline for a brand often has some characteristics. When I look at Apple for instance, the design is clean and simple. The logo itself doesn't have a sharp corner on it. So I would define Apple as a soft, subtle, clear brand. If you were to add sharp corners in an Apple design it would look a bit odd. The image above shows a hard shape and a soft shape. I generally look for these type of constants in a brand. If a brand is soft, the buttons will be rounded, I'll use lighter colors and such. If a brand is made up of sharp corners, I will adjust my design to match. Logo's Another part of shapes is the logo. A logo is usually a shape and some text. The stronger the shape of the logo

In my previous blog-post I explained I am blogging all through the summer about Visual (Web)Design. This is part 2, where we'll focus on typography. Typography According to Wikipedia typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. I feel typography is not often valued correctly. Typograpy is one of the key aspects to Visual Design. It helps in setting an emotion, when done well it helps in brand recognition. Looking at webdesign there are more things to take into consideration. Emotion Typography sets an emotion. Often people frown when I say this, but showing one particular font helps explain my message. Yes, I am using Comic Sans in this blog post! Which of the two words above looks more important? When you're using Comic Sans for the word 'help' I wonder how many people see the urgency of your request. When using the Impact font (especially in all-caps) it looks mo

This summer I want to bring you a set of blog posts about Visual Webdesign. Recently I started noticing basic design knowledge is lost in the digital world. In the responsive era many webdesigns have become... well... kinda boring. Its all colored boxes. Many sites look quite similar. The only difference between the wireframes and the design is color. And I think Visual Webdesigners can do better. We've become lazy. This series is intended to stop designers for a single moment to realize we can do better. Visual Design is so impressive and so valuable to every project - that you need to get the basics right. Visual Webdesign I think there are 5 elements to visual webdesign: color, typography, shapes, pictures and motion. I want to dive into these elements one by one. My aim is to put a blog online weekly for the next 5 weeks - diving into one of the elements every week. This week we'll start with Color. Color There are many aspects to color. Did you kn

Since starting at Capgemini, six weeks ago, I've been diving into Virtual Reality once again. I had experienced it at an employer before, working for Oculus Rift at the time. I also had my reservations because, being a designer, I thought the quality was too poor. Here's how Virtual Reality has been part of my life as a designer. QuickTime It all started somewhere in the 2000's when QuickTime started with 360 Panorama photo's leading to my first VR experience. It wasn't with goggles of any kind. It was a photo or maybe also a video that was created so you could drag your mouse and watch the surroundings. At the time that was pretty impessive and its a shame Apple has ended support for QuickTime for Windows. QuickTime has been a big part of my career in the past. Oculus Rift I moved over to the Oculus Rift. There were some technical guys who ordered it and experience with it. I created some models to be used on the Oculus. I haven't seen the Oculus

Recently I have written about content for various clients and I thought it would be nice to share what I've been writing. Although I've tried to keep it short - this blog will take some time to read. But I think it'll be worth it. Your audience You'll need to know who your talking to. Its quite different if you're talking to decision makers or a visitor who just want to read about your product or service. You need to know who your audience is so you can decide on a tone-of-voice. Are you going to be open and friendly or maybe very strict and corporate? Content goals Write down your content goals, so you will develop your content with the right mindset or focus if you will. If your goal is to inspire - make sure your content inspires. Anything that takes you away from this goal will clutter the website. It also helps in making choices for your designers. If I need to inspire I will not choose a font such as Arial for instance. Responsibility It is importa

Last week I was invited to visit the Hieronymus Bosch show currently showing at the Noordbrabants Museum. I was involved with the concept and realisation of the campaign website for the exhibition so I was invited to visit this amazing exhibition. Hieronymus Bosch As I stood there, alone, in front of a masterpiece I had seen on my screen over a hundred times in a period of just a few weeks I was amazed how interesting it really is. Hieronymus Bosch died 500 years ago this year. He lived from around 1450 till 1516. The paint on those paintings, the concept, the realisation has been made over 500 years ago. Yet, if you look at the big success of the exhibition, people still find his work amazing and want to see it. After 500 years it still matters greatly. Webdesign It's a big contrast to my work. My work is always fast and temporary. A website, app or anything else I create is not timeless. The campaign website for Hieronymus for instance runs from Jan 1st until the end

This blog post is about service and digital transformation. I want to take a real-life situation and relate it to what we call service these days and want to talk a little bit about digital transformation. First I need to explain the situation: High service, low pricing - the introduction During Christmas our washing machine broke. When I bought it, only 3 years ago, I also bought a service contract at the store. It was pretty pricey, so you'd expect service. Obviously I wasn't expecting anyone to work during Christmas, so on the first working day after Christmas I called the company. I would have used Whatsapp or Twitter - but the company isn't active on those media. I got a guy on the phone telling me they would come round after 4 days. On that day no-one showed up. Instead we got a card from a 3rd party that they wanted to set a date to take a look. Another 4 days passed. The 3rd party came and took a look. The mechanic noticed two modules that weren't working. He