About me
I am front-end designer with extensive experience in designing and
developing complex websites and applications. Beautiful design and applying it to a
well-functioning end result, where user experience and accessibility are paramount, give me
a warm feeling. Micro-animations also excite me.
I work precisely, have an eye for detail, think self-development is important and am not
afraid to take a critical look at myself. Furthermore, I am loyal, easy going and get
energy from working with colleagues.
When I started working at 80dB in 2009 I started out as an assistant designer. I worked a lot with Flash, primarily making animations. Around the time Flash was deprecated, my tasks shifted more and more to front-end development. I still did front-end design, but now I also helped transforming the design to an actual workind end product.
At Online Seminar our latest projects were done in Angular and React. Although I can't work independently with these frameworks, I did work with them and do relatively simple things. For example creating a new component based on already existing components.
In the future I would like to learn JavaScript. In part so I can work better
with JS based frameworks, but I also would love to explore animation libraries like GSAP
and Three.js.
Acccessibility is an area I think is important to learn more about. And of course I want
to keep honing my CSS skills.
Interests
Art
I like to visit museums, particularly to see Asian- and modern art. Something I should do more often... Concept art for video games and movies I also enjoy.
Boardgames
Lately I have been getting into board games. It started with Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion and currently I'm in the middle of the campaign of ISS Vanguard, a cooperative Sci-Fi game. I have backed Cthulhu: Death May Die - Fear of the Unknown and Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood on kickstarter, and am looking forward to playing those!
Books
I love reading books, particularly in the Fantasy or Science Fiction genre. My favorite series is Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. The Three-Body Problem trilogy is next on my to read list.
Music
Music is an important part of my life. I mostly listen to metal, but sometimes also indie and drum'n bass. Fluisteraars is one of my favorite bands. Amenra is the best live performance I ever saw. If I really like an album I buy it on vinyl, else I'll buy the digital version on bandcamp. Bandcamp is also nice for discovering new bands.
Videogames
I've been playing videogames for a long time. My first computer was an Amiga 500. I used to play a lot of Destiny (1 and 2) on the PlayStation and World of Warcraft on the PC before that. Nowadays I play a lot less. And if I do, it is mostly single-player games like the The Last of Us and Horizon series for example.
About this website
This webiste was not only created to showcase projects I have worked on
over
the last years. Since most of those projects are not publicly accessible, this portfolio
website itself can be a way to show my skills. I also used it to try out new CSS that I
hadn't used before, some due to browser support.
Vite was used to set up the website. PostCSS takes care of polyfills for CSS that is not
widely supported yet.
Accessibility
I am familiar with accessibility concepts like using the correct HTML elements, making sure there is enough color contrast between text and background and reducing or omitting motion animations when preferred for example. But after I had a meeting with an accessibility expert from one of the clients of Online Seminar, I realised there was still a lot to learn in that area.
There are a few things I still need to improve:
- Navigation of the mobile menu should be confined to the menu when it is open.
- The text in the main heading on the homepage is animated. Aria-label is used, but it only contains the final sentence. Maybe there is a better way to handle this.
JavaScript
My skill with JavaScript is not that great unfortunately. The main source for the JavaScript used on this website was Stack Overflow and ChatGPT. I have learned quite a bit about how to structure prompts to get ChatGPT give me useable code.
New CSS
While building this website I have used the opportunity to use a few new CSS properties and units. Some examples are:
- Inline and block margin and padding instead of top, left etc.
- oklch color and color-mix().
- Rotate, scale and translate properties, in addition to or replacing transform.
- Nested CSS.
- New media query range syntax.
- Dynamic viewport and container query length units.
Typography
The fonts used on this website are Neue Machina and Telegraf, both by Pangram Pangram Foundry.