In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Marc Köhlbrugge, (crowdSPRING username: marckohlbrugge) today. Marc lives, studies and works in the Netherlands.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Marc Köhlbrugge, I’m 21 years old and live in a town called Nuenen in The Netherlands. I travel to Breda daily, the city where my school is located. There, I follow a study called “Communication & Multimedia Design” which is focused on everything related to new media. Graphic design, philosophy, technology, marketing, psychology, interaction design, the whole shebang. Basically I’m being trained to be a jack of all trades, but in a good way. Jobs get more and more specialized, which creates a demand for people who can communicate with those specialists and have a good overview of the whole project. Well, that’s me.
That’s the idea anyway. I’m expecting to obtain my Bachelor of Arts degree later this year. We’ll see how everything works out in the real world.
Talking about the real world – I’m in the process of getting serious about freelancing. I already do some client work on the side, but because of my study I’m not yet able to devote myself entirely to freelancing. With only a couple of months of study to go, the time is coming to get serious about it.
Graphic design will probably be part of the of projects I’ll work on, but I’m more interested in guiding creative processes. I’m not yet sure in which way, but I like thinking more than doing. We’ll see how that works out.
2. How did you start out doing graphic design?
I started drawing when I was young. When I got a little older, I started taking toys apart and later building weird constructions with Lego™. Then, when I was around 11 years old, my brother brought home a copy of Adobe Photoshop.
I already knew my way around computer back then so I learned Photoshop pretty quickly from an early age (with a little help from my brother). While other kids had just found out about “Word Art”, I was designing my school documents in Photoshop.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later when I really started designing new stuff versus manipulating existing photos. At that time I was really fascinated with the idea of hacking into computers. I read an article that said you had to know at least one programming language to become a hacker so I started learning HTML (which isn’t really a programming language, but I didn’t know that at the time). I kinda stuck creating websites and never got into hacking (fortunately?).
The thing about websites is the combination of technology and design. They go hand in hand. It was great because I finally could combine my technical skills with my design skills.
That’s how I started out, creating websites. After a while I started creating all kind of graphics and learned about Illustrator, which I then used for all my logo designs. I’m now learning Adobe After Effects to create motion graphics and hope to soon learn some more post-production related tools.
3. crowdSPRING selected your design for its homepage and interior pages in the first project that was run on crowdSPRING back in the Spring of 2008. Please talk a bit about that project and the challenges you faced designing for a new startup.
March 4th, 2008. The day this whole adventure started. I noticed an email message in my inbox, which at that moment I discarded as some kind of junk-mail. It was from a company called crowdSPRING I’d never heard about and I was wondering how they got my email address. (I probably signed up somewhere, I just didn’t remember).
I almost trashed the message but I noticed, when skimming through it, they were holding a design competition with a big cash reward. I also liked the casual tone of the message (you know, that fresh flavor every text written by crowdSPRING seems to have, it’s pure awesomeness), I decided to take a look at the website, read about the competition and decided to take a stab at it.
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