Thesis

Way back, in my final year in Art College I wrote my final thesis on subway maps and subway signage. Quite an extensive work it turned out to be: I researched the London Subway, used it as the perfect model and compared it to the smallest subways on Earth: Amsterdam and Rotterdam. I was rather ambitious, it turned into a 120-pager! 

You can imagine, I did quite a lot of citytrips to the three cities.

Susan Kare

Without actually realising it, Susan Kare infuenced and changed my professional life. She began her career at Apple Inc. where she was the screen graphics and digital font designer for the original Macintosh computer. Her icons made the computer accessible and even attractive to me. Before I got in touch with WYSIWYG, I was quite 'scared' of computers.
According to the Museum of Modern Art in New York Susan is 'a pioneering and influential computer iconographer. She has designed thousands of icons for the world's leading software companies. Utilizing a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision, her icons communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style.'

So, besides Steve Jobs, I would like to thank Susan for making me love my Mac!

Let children learn

things to learn from Matt Edgar on Vimeo.

Dutch illustrator/designer Christan Borstlap was commissioned to design the children's stamps for 2009 for the Dutch TNT. This charity project focuses on the promotion of children's education. Dutch children at the age of about 10 go door to door to sell these stamps. I remember when I was at the right age to sell them. I had to run home and start my selling activities immediately, otherwise someone else would have beaten me to it. The stamps were very popular, everyone bought them! Needless to say, that was in the pre e-mail era.

For the promotion of the 2009 stamps Christian made an animation which I saw at the Berlin Pictoplasma Festival. I had never seen the stamps, nor the animation... So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the animations I enjoyed most was designed by a Dutch illustrator! In fact, I was already familiar with his work. His brother Jan-Jacob used to be a colleague of mine at EdenSpiekermann. Check out his website for more great work.

I'm Jac (Irene Jacobs) in Vancouver!

Yesterday I was searching for new input for a post about an interesting illustrator when Irene Jacobs (I'm Jac) popped into my head. Years ago I worked with her a on an assignment for a Dutch energy company. So I went over to her website and I was utterly surprised and amazed to discover that she made the beautiful illustrations and pictograms for the amazing Vancouver Olympic graphic style (in close collaboration with the Vanoc design team). Probably the whole world was aware of the fact that a Dutch girl was commissioned for this job but I only found out yesterday...
This is what the official Vancouver website says about the graphic style:

'Created in collaboration with illustrator Irene Jacobs of I’m JAC Design, the pictograms represent 19 Olympic and five Paralympic sport disciplines with a simplified silhouette while incorporating the added dynamism of the athlete in motion. The pictograms and sport illustrations were inspired by modern sport photography, pop culture, fashion illustration and manga-style comics (a Japanese genre of comic books) to give athletes an heroic feel and a close-up view of their intensity and athleticism, while also serving as an inspiration to youth.
'

The second picture is the illustration she did for Eneco, embedded in our graphic design. That was made about 10 years ago, so you can see how her work developed. She has a blog as well.

Marco Faasen

An illustrator I've been keeping my eye on is Rotterdam based Marco Faasen. Hopefully I'll be able to work with him in the future. He's really good at designing pictograms (great for infograhics) and developing characters. Take a close look at his website, it's worth a visit!

ho ho ho, merry xmas!

I'm always in doubt whether or not to make my own christmas-cards. I'm never really inspired but I decided to make a design anyway.

Co-production

Yvette and I made this children's book for grown-ups for a colleague of ours at Eden.

Enlargement

For the Sinterklaas-celebration at Lewis' school I made this big key. The children use it to open the door to 'the castle'. As could be expected the key broke into two pieces the very first day... Handmade objects are far too fragile for 4 and 5 -year olds.

Me as a logo

I'm originally from Zeeland so I used the logo for the butter 'Zeeuws Meisje' to present myself. I don't use it anymore, but I suddenly thought about it and decided to post it.