Tell people you’re a designer and they’ll be able to comprehend. Tell them you’re also a developer and their brain starts putting one skill above the other. Even worse, they’ll assume the total sum of skills became less than that of a person only having one. Having not two – but skills in the dozens; I would add up to being about as skillful as an average kitchen sink. In that case, I’m one hell of a kitchen sink.
I’m not sure what I am. Except for being very hard to label. I might be wrecking a club somewhere in China on a Saturday as a DJ, be knee deep in programming Max 4 Live devices on Sunday and finishing a remix for a major artist the next day.
As a DJ I’ve toured the world, did about any size of gig you can imagine from Tomorrowland to your local bar. I’ve got a couple of top ten chart hits in the United Kingdom under my belt. My music supported by the biggest names in the industry. I run a recordlabel. I’ve founded one of the biggest agencies of The Netherlands and have a few more enterprises on the side.
Yet, I’m never too far from a computer. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects or Premiere Pro – I love graphic design. Oh, and 3D design as well. Sometimes a bit of copywriting or for the sake of giggles be writing the odd column. Besides being stuck behind either a DJ booth, studio console or MacPro I’m also a public speaker and tutor.
“What a brag-fest, geez!”. Don’t worry, I get that reaction a lot. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be another way to explain what I do without having to put up a portfolio that would be a mile long. As if all of the above wasn’t enough, I’m also a software developer. The kind that can dream in several programming languages. The type of human with an unsual love for normalized databases. Apart from all the digital malarkey, I’ve found myself being able to speak quite a few human languages as well.
By now you might be wondering what the purpose of this story and the website behind it is. Truth be told, there isn’t an obvious one. I’m not looking for new customers. Nor do I feel particularly interested in spending a month to gather all the projects I’ve done in the past 25 years. I’m not here to make a whole lot of sense. My company isn’t named human logic, but Vatologic for reasons about as dubious as the fact the logo is an alpaca. In short.
I do stuff.