About Me

Hi, I’m Daniël, a designer of digital product experiences in the Netherlands with more than 10 years of practice. Design has been my passion from a young age, I love solving complex problems and using technology to improve people's live. I occasionally do some side-projects creating games, applications, or writing about my findings in UX and design. I'm a creative mind who loves storytelling and tinkering with things.

I'm in my thirties and married to an amazing wive, we live in a small Dutch town close to nature, and we have two very sweet pet rabbits living in our outdoor garden. I love riding my bike across the Dutch countryside and watching all kinds of movies and series.

Early age: Making comics and websites

I got interested in web design at an early age. I started building websites with a free publishing tool, but quickly began looking into html and css as well to increase my capabilities. I made my earliest websites as a hobby, but over time I began designing for small businesses as well.

My most succesful website was aimed at publishing my self-drawn comics. The site had many visitors, and when I was 14 it had been nominated by a jury twice for a 'Gouden @penstaart', an important price for teens in the Netherlands. It led me to believe that I should pursue a career in arts, and a few years later I was accepted at the Willem De Kooning academy in Rotterdam to study illustration.

2012-2017: Studies in art and design

However, I quickly found out that I wasn't really an artist when I studied at the academy. I love solving problems, and using technology to improve people's lives. This wasn't really something that the tutors at the academy could teach me, so I switched to studying Communication and Multimedia Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. There I learned more about design thinking, and how to combine marketing, research and technology to create interactive products.

I didn't lose sight of my interest in comics though. The webcomic was enventually discontinued, but I still made cartoons for the news website that I worked for, and ended up graduating at a new comics museum in Rotterdam which had a intensive startup vibe. In my graduation project I combined my artistic skills with my technological, by creating an immersive game aimed at teaching young children about the history of comics in the Netherlands.

Today: Being a designer

During my studies I began doing freelance projects for bigger clients. I learned more about programming using Javascript, PHP, MySQL and Git from other programmers that I worked with, and began launching full products and features as well. I also learned a lot about web analytics and user-centered design, optimizing for conversion and talking to users.

After I graduated I started working at the agency WebNL. I had already done an internship and some parttime work there, after which they were very happy to hire me fulltime. I worked on designs for many clients, I participated in design sprints, I ran a usability lab, and I developed front-end, websites, and games as a UX engineer.

In 2019 I felt I needed a change from delivering short-term projects, I wanted to contribute to a more long-term vision. I found this opportunity at Metrixlab, a global market research firm, where I became a lead UX/UI designer and set up a design vision, a design team and a design system to redesign a large legacy IT platform.