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 ...

Last Friday I got to visit the 2nd edition of Dsgnday in Amsterdam - many thanks to my employer Insiders for allowing me and 2 colleagues to visit Dsgnday. In this blog-post I would like to recap what I have seen and how I have experienced the talks. Simon Collison - The Designer's Guide to Being Essential The first speaker of the day was Simon Collison. Simon was very smart in combining his life story with his message. Simon explained how his life was modular and how he forgot some modules of his past and refound them over the past years. He continued that robots know it all. All the modules in webdesign can be designed by robots. So what makes a human webdesigner better than the machines? The answer to the question would be empathy. Simon quoted from an article by Travis Gertz. I've read it and I think its a must read. The part about AirBnb is very sadly so true. Its the most asked question of 2015 for me: can we have something like AirBnb? Great article , be sure ...

A few weeks ago me and my employer decided it was best to split. Because I am the sole income for my family (mortgage, car, 2 kids...) I need to find a new job and prefer to find one soon. I decided I'd like to find out how and if social media could help me out on this one. I needed to get noticed and wondered if social media could help me do just that. LinkedIn. I've taken LinkedIn as the basis for my experiment. LinkedIn is the business network where you place your résumé online. Just like you "Google" your possible new employer, that employer Googles you. Most often your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn account will be found. LinkedIn keeps a ranking. It gives you feedback on how you rank amongst the people you know. On LinkedIn I've got about 475 connections. At the beginning of this experiment I ranked at 128. That's not bad, but it isn't brilliant. It meant that my profile was viewed an average 1,5 times a week. And there was my challenge....

Recently I've seen a lot of posts by people advocating designers to do what makes them happy. That's quite a statement, because very often you'll have to do work you don't find challenging. Here's a few thoughts on keeping your motivation and building ambitions. Taking on shit work First rule of the book. When you're working for an employer, expect them to accept shit work. Don't blame your boss too much, you have to understand his position. He needs money to flow through the company in order to pay you and your colleagues at the end of the month. That automatically implies taking on work he'd rather not - but pays well. No space for improvement The biggest challenge of every designer is time. Everybody expects your best work for the lowest price. I am not a big Steve Jobs fan, but the one thing you have to give him credit for: he knew why design matters. Design makes your product unique. Not investing in design means y...