To be honest I have been pretty bussy with working at TriMM lately. We decided to postpone my farewell at TriMM so that gives me and them a bit more time to find a next job/co-worker. Just yesterday I made a list with all the web related work I want to add to this site so that potential employers get a better idea and picture of me. Or atleast my work.

Updates will be made, but for now let me reward you with a nice link to 50 great examples of infographics!

Working with my hands is what I like and that made me think of some old school work I did that wasn’t on the website already. Simple redesign of a matchbox and some ‘shoebox’ pictures based on the lyrics of DJ Shadows Six Days. Apart from the schoolwork there is a lot more that needs to be uploaded, but I have to get approval from the big bosses first… Very frustrating to have very nice work laying on the shelve, but you can’t show it to the world… Aargh! To hell with legal issues!

Ow and by the way, the titled is written in the dialect of Cologne meaning “the water of Cologne is good”. Since it is pooring with rain today I thought it was appropriate.

During the last two years I have been working at TriMM I also did some smaller assignments for the in-house consultancy agency GriDD. It started of with some small DTP-ing and tweaking businessmodels and presentations but it’s getting bigger and better. Last year I made an infographic that represented the new office we were going to move to and it was a gift ofor TriMM. Since last year NXP and some other major clients got me and GriDD all worked up about infographics. I really like working on these visuals and wanted to thanks GriDD for those fine jobs.

As a sidekick and to help out in their presentations GriDD asked Sjors Trimbach to design a character. And so Gregg was born! One year ago Gregg saw the light of ‘day’ and as a celebration different artists were asked to make a drawing/sketch/piece of art. In a few minutes time I made my share which came in handy since the planned artist couldn’t make it! Thanks Gregg for all the nice work you have brought me!

Yesterday was the third edition of the Dutch Infographics Congress in Zeist. It was a very informative and diverse day with a handful of speakers that were really worth listening to. What me immediatly surprised was the mixed audience. Students, professionals and even some grey haired older man. Very broad so to speak. I won’t be writing a report about the whole day from start to finish but just give you some highlights.

My personal favourite were the last ones to have their speech, the guys from Catalogtree. They have a really nice approach to their infographics and I love the way how they come up with nerdy-computer-techie solutions to create their graphics. I feel very related to that style of working, hehe. They showed us a great project about diplomats who work in New York and got parking tickets. The locations, time of date, how often, they had all the data and using computers and software they created some awesome very clean and stylish infographics.

Then their was Chris Campbell. He works as a infographic designer for the International Court of Justice in The Hague. His work only shows data that is true. If their are not sure about a certain detail it cannot be included in the graphic. That is because the graphics he makes are used in trials for the Prosecutor. Since the defends alost always objects when he want’s to show one, he thinks he does a good job. So do it. He makes good use of time in his graphics. Some of them are animated, but only when needed.

That is also something that Chris Blow said at the start of the day. He finds it problematic that people who create infographics these days only make them because they look good (I personally think that is what we can call art). He says that infographics should only be used to clarify your opinion about something. The infographic is just a tool, not the result. I somehow agree with him, but come one, sometimes it just looks really cool and there doesn’t have to be a point to it. For the same reason he also isn’t a fan of competitions (basically the whole point of the Infographics 2010), because then graphics are designer for judges and not for the audience. True.

A different and more relaxing presentation was the infographic battle between Kay Coenen and Roland Blokhuizen. They both got the assignment on Wednesday last week so they had two days to prepare, but man was it cool to sey their completely different approaches to the problem. They had to clarify why the earth was turning faster since the earthquake in Chile. During the 20 minute period the audience could listen to some nice jazz music and Remy Jon Ming who talked it all together. Roland has a very 3D approach where as Kay works much more simpler. The results where both really nice and I won’t go into the details, but Kay’s was way simpler and easier to understand. After their battle the public got a really annoying and boring commercial speech about Cinema 4D and how awesome it was. Hope these kind of speeches won’t be their next year…

The other commercial speech was from the Augsburg University and their professor Michael Stoll. It was a boring and lengthy. What more can I say. Only cool thing was one of the student’s final exam work. An installation that lets you skip through records who are sampled. You can listen to the original, check what pieces are used as samples and listen to those sampled parts in the songs. The guy, Roland Lößlein, made a very niceinstallation that contained LP’s with RFID chips and a projected user interface onto the record itself. Really intuitive and very slick and stylish. This whole day gave me a load of inspiration and good idea’s. Next year I’ll be attending again for sure!

On this dull and snowy Monday morning I received an e-mail from a colleague for an upcoming event about infographics. Since I have made a few infographics for GriDD consultancy in the last year he thought I would be interested. Hell yeah I am! Infographics ask for such a different style of thinking and analysing compared to the way I worked in art school… Maybe it is my two years of University and the technical study I attended that make me hungry for big truckloads of info that need to be visually explained. Who knows?

Anyway the 5th of March we will be off to the little town of Zeist (near Utrecht) to attend InfographICs 2010! Really looking forward to this since Charles Blow is having a lecture in the morning. Since “he led The New York Times to a best of show award for the information graphics coverage of 9/11″ I don’t suspect it to be boring. If you just read this and don’t know what infographics actually are you should just go and have a look over at Smashing Magazine’s article about Data Visualization and Infographics. Very, uh, informative.

Last post I mentioned the Golden Receivers, remember? If not scroll down and read… Well as it turns out they just released their new EP. It can be downloaded and listend to online over at Bandcamp (including all the older EP’s). The first four songs are newer ones and are also of a different style, but I prefer that one. The other ones are older and leftovers. Crotch rocket being my personal favourite for a long time… Nice to finaly have a recorder version of this song! The EP isn’t called “A Horse Named Sadness, Leftovers & Lost Sessions” for nothing.

Don’t get too excited because the band is planning on calling it a day (which doesn’t mean the band members stop making music). Too bad, but I hope this new style will get some more attention (especially from their guitarist) and untill then…fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Some of you might know I have a fondness for analogue photography and the corresponding cameras. Sure, shooting some pictures digital is a lot quicker and most of the time easier too. I also own a digital SLR, but sometimes it’s just so much more relaxing to shoot something analogue. Over the years I collected a few. Some standard 35 mm film but also some that need a roll of 120 film. I don’t really have a preference for a type of film, but sometimes medium format’s large negatives make for cleaner and clearer pictures.

It all started with a Ricoh SLX 500 that I found in my parents attic (this is the standard procedure I think, haha) in 2004. It was a nice set all snugly kept away in a special carrying case. The set consisted of the Ricoh body, a 50 mm objective and a 29 mm objective and a UV filter. To my disappointment the mirror was locked and the owner of my local photography store couldn’t get it fixed (at least not without me paying a lot of money for it) so I just left it like it is. Maybe I take apart someday just to see how it works. Who knows?

The Ricoh triggered my attention and made me look a bit harder to find a working analogue camera. My nephew came to the rescue and donated me his old Nikon FE. He got a digital SLR so he didn’t ‘need it’ anymore… Well, I couldn’t get much luckier. A Nikon FE in perfect working order including the Nikon 50 mm f1.8 and a Nikon zoomlens 36-72 mm Series E and also a polarization filter and a UV filter. This camera has been used the most. It is still in daily use. Either by me or by my girlfriend. This camera thought me a lot on analogue photography. Apertures, timing, over- and underexposing all those basics that are just a need to know.

Another camera that tought me a lot was the first pinhole camera I made. It was made after an online paper version I found while looking for information about pinhole cameras and how to build them. Pinhole camera’s are real miracles. They work with the easiest principle of light. Let it pass through a small hole and a reversed (upside down, but not mirrored) images apears at the otherside. This particular Dirkon Pinhole Camera is made of paper, but virtually anything can be used. I bought a lightmeter and got started with a roll of 50 iso Ilford 35 mm film. I was able to calculate the F value of this little beast (around 170!) and also had a bit more of an idea to wat timing to use… The results van be seen in the Photography section. Five minutes of light on the film seemed to do the trick on a sunny day. And it gives a very nice feeling knowing that you did all by yourself. Build the camera, develope the film and make the prints. Very satisfactioning!

These two working camera’s above are the ones I have used the most. I have some more, but thos aren’t being used almost every day. They will be discussed later and contain a few more 35mm cam’s, but also my very first and only one TLR Voigtländer!

My latest assignment for a corporate identity was for Marloes Rooswinkel. She was going to start her own business with financial services. She will be providing people with insurance, loans and pensions.  This post will explain the design proces I followed with her and ending the whole story with some conclusions. This really worked well!

Marloes Rooswinkel and I had a first meeting in which we discussed the following 5 keywords:

• Brand – User experience
• Customer – Transmitter
• User – Receiver
• Information – Content
• Design

Customer and User communicate with each other and the Information and Design are your restrictions or boundaries.

First, I had no knowledge of the types of services she offers. This will often occur and as a designer you have to dive in to it to some extent. To get  more feeling with the design, but also to understand the customer or the user of the product (in this case the website).

Basis

After a brief explanation about her field of work, we also discussed her history as a financial consultant, why she now wanted to start on her own and how she got to that. Everything went well and I had a whole list of questions, but during the conversation a lot of those got answered. I didn’t have to start an interview in which I asked a question, got an answer, wrote it down and went on to the next question. Luckily! Sometimes it is difficult to  keep the conversation going because you also want to wright down things, but don’t want to be looking away from your conversational partner at the same time. Plus, you have to write in such a way that your handwriting is still readable, hehe.

During the conversation I already had a vision about the website and how it should look like. As I found out this was completely matching Marloes’ vision too.

Because this is a corporate identity, we first determined that about 5 words should form the basis for the complete design of her company’s identity. This worked super! The following words were chosen:

• Classic
• Elegant
• Quiet
• Open
• Familiar

Logo/Wordmark

After this first meeting I had a good feeling with the branding. Then comes the hardest part. Translating that feeling into a graphic or something visual, which then is transfered to paper and then into the computer. I did a few sketch sessions with the word and some style tryouts. I just tend to throw anything onto paper that pops up. Afterwards you can always throw something away. At the end of such session, I lined up the drawings and reflected them to the keywords I established earlier. From each drawing some things had to go, sometimes the complete sketch, but all those little parts together were forming a very nice image.

Eventually I had a logo with a badge that addresses the feeling very well. After some minimal changes to it I showed it Marloes and explained it on the basis the (by me) rejected logos. To make the path I followed clear to her.

Stationary

The days after I finished the wordmark I got on to the letterhead, business cards and envelopes. This was a fairly small step. The logo really lends itself for this and everything fell in it’s right place. After a meeting where everything was approved and finalized I got on to the next step I wanted to determine. After the 5 keywords I wanted to get the tone of voice for the photography clear. I had some trouble doing this and I think that’s also because of those keywords. There is nog need for a tone of voice. The keywords are enough, plus there isn’t much photography in the website too.

Funny thing I discovered was that those keywords were automatically some sort of filter system. Classical, but not too frivolous. Elegant, but not too feminine. Maybe next time this can be used in a design process. For now there wasn’t enough time to use these ‘scales’ to their full extent.

Website

I handled the design of the website in the same way as the logo was tackled. Create sketches and then check it against the keywords. It still fits? If not, why not, what is not right? Change it. And start over. So I came to a clear site design. The top menu bar is always present and the wordmark is centered above that. Then there is a small introduction text and below that three clearly separated business lines. Completely appropriate within the keywords.

One thing that the website differed from other parts of the corporate website is that it has a real purpose. This was necessary to get clear. Was the website just going to be informative? Or selling? Or maybe another purpose? In the case of Marloes the purposed of the website was to give the visitor/client confidence in Rooswinkel’s bussiness and thereby generate trust with the customer. That trust is important for a long term customer relationships where Marloes is at. Clients can not order an insurance or loan online, that’s not the purpose. Marloes Rooswinkel wants long term relationships so the client has to put in a bit of effort to get into contact with here and arrange a loan, insurance, credit, or what so ever.

Conclusions: Looking for these keywords is a good foundation. Five pieces is a good number. It is enough to remember, they are more than three and it is a whole handful. Certainly in this case where there is still nothing. Comparing the websites of competitors was also a handy trick.

Check your design with the keywords every time. Sketch a lot and immediately. Any inspiration that helps, you put on paper. Sometimes you build your design from many pieces of  ‘wrong’ sketches. All those pieces together constitute the logo.

Words on a scale to help for photography or other manifestations of the brand can help. A colleague if mine also called archetypes, a sort of defining your brand as a person. For Rooswinkel there was too little time and it wasn’t really necessary. Rooswinkel is perhaps a little too small, after all it’s just one person.

What do you find good approaches to a design proces or how do you like to work?

“You know you are a graphic designer when…”

There are tons of versions of this list and most of the time it is just posted on someone’s blog. So the source remains unknown.