Immer is a Dutch startup that wants to revolutionize digital reading. As the sole designer, I had the task of shaping the whole app, from style to structure and every interaction in between. We were inspired by things like Instagram stories, and our experiences as game development veterans, to create a playful experience that takes existing books further than what a traditional e-reader can do.
During my time at Yoast, I was sponsored to spend some time each week contributing to the development of the blogging platform WordPress, for which they were creating products. WordPress itself is a foundation based on volunteers, so that made organization and productivity difficult sometimes, but also offers the opportunity to pick up big projects and learn a lot about communication.
Next to all the small quality of life improvements I made together with other designers, I worked on roughly three major projects: the development of 'Gutenberg', their completely new post editor; Site Health, which scans for problems on your site; and coordinating the 5.7 version release.
For insurance agency a.s.r. I helped design the Dienstenwinkel (services store), an online platform for employers, casemanagers, advisors, and more, to discover and order services that a.s.r. or trusted third parties provide. This could be care for sick employees, trainings, or different services to keep their companies running smoothly.
The platform was built from the ground up in OutSystems, so me and the business analyst were involved from the start to map out the wishes and design the structure. It was a complex business case that (uniquely) touches several departments across the company, so there were many stakeholders and sometimes conflicting wishes. We always tried to create a solution that leaves as much doors open for different use cases as possible.
Because we operated as an independent team, we were able to launch an MVP within 4 months, and built it out into a profitable platform in the two years following.
I started here as an illustrator, but pretty soon saw opportunities to improve the user experience of the products. There was no dedicated designer working on that, so over the years I built a UX department with several employees.
Together we set up and maintained a design system in Sketch to keep track of all the components we use and make sure they stay consistent. This allowed us to draft mockups much faster. I worked on several big projects like the customer portal, online academy, Gutenberg integration, configuration wizard, settings redesign, and also did work for the underlying platform, WordPress, as you can read about elsewhere on this site.
One morning a former colleague asked me to update his website. We sketched wireframes over lunch, I built the mockups in Figma in the afternoon, and he had a basic live version ready the next day.
Designed as a one-pager, it highlights all his relevant experience and other information in a fresh modern design that you don't often see on the portfolio of a developer, but Anton wanted to stand out and communicate his creative approach to software development, so it felt fitting to present him this way.
The Figma file is built using Auto Layout and thus reacts well to responsive widths. I also built a tablet-sized version that doubles as a PDF export which Anton can use to send out as his resume.
I support Loyalis in their business development with quick strategic wireframes and prototypes when they want to add a new feature to their portal.
They prefer solutions that surgically target the user story, so they can solve problems quickly, and anything in addition to that is a cost-benefit anaylsis. So I must clearly understand the use case, and therefore I am often already present during brainstorming meetings.
Shortly after the requirements have been laid out, I make a clickable prototype of the intended flow, based on the wireframes, so that everyone can review the ideas and refine the solution before anything gets built.
The website you're currently looking at was built from the ground up by me, using HTML, CSS, and a little bit of PHP. Over the years it has gone through several iterations where I continuously applied new techniques I had learned.
The site is fully responsive with several breakpoints that restructure the content for tablet and mobile. I use PHP includes to load common components such as navigation from a central file in a modular way, I used a CDN to offer images in the most suitable format and resolution, and cache elements that change infrequently to speed up loading. As a result, the site has a score of 98% in Google PageSpeed Insights, which looks at speed, accessibility, SEO, and more.
On top of that, the site has a dark mode that responds to the user's system setting, and the content is available in two languages