Kleber had always been high on my list of agencies to work at, so I didn’t waste any time emailing them. I waited the obligatory week before emailing them again to see if they received my application. Three weeks passed without a reply. I’d learned from experience that if you haven’t had a reply after a month, your chances of hearing anything positive are small so I put this job application on the back burner and continued freelancing and worrying about ever getting a full time job again…

Luckily I still had some work keeping me busy. Publisher Friends Of Ed (of the 4×4 books) got back in touch asking if I was interested in working on more books. They paid well, and since I was desperate to keep cash coming in I accepted. Soon enough I was writing a few chapters for a new book on Advanced After Effects 5.5, even though my AE skills were too basic for that kind of book. I didn’t take long for the editors of the book to realize I was blagging my way through timelines and filters, so they thanked me for the work done, paid me a cut-off fee and that was it. I still got comp copies of the book when it came out though, with an “Additional material by…” credit (even though I never found out if they actually used any of my material)!

Design of a site for the Dreamweaver book

A little later however they offered me another book, this time about a subject I did know something about: websites.
Together with Dave Smith (one of my 4×4 co-authors) I started working on a book showing you the ins and outs of designing “Visual Websites With Dreamweaver MX and Photoshop”. Dave and I really got into it, creating fake sites for the book and we quickly started writing a few chapters. Halfway through Friends of Ed pulled the plug — Macromedia had announced their MX 2004 suite, making our book in one swift move obsolete. Oh well, we got paid for our work.

Still from my Lost In Space 3D reel

Meanwhile I was working on pitches via Lost In Space for commercials and working on a 3d showreel. Nothing that earned me any money, but at least my portfolio grew, I gained some valuable exposure and I met new people in the biz.

March came, and out of curiosity I checked Kleber’s site again, when lo and behold, they posted a “We’re still looking for a designer.” message! I immediately emailed them an “I’m still looking for a job” email, explaining I contacted them back in January etc etc. A few days later I got a reply inviting me for a meeting and a portfolio review at their basement office in Central London (Fitzrovia).

Kleber’s Central London basement office around 2002

The chat went well, and I got invited back the next week for a “try-out” afternoon. They gave me the brief for a band site they just completed and asked me for my interpretation. At the end of the day, it seemed they liked my take on the site and a quick chat after work later I went back home. A few nervous days later I got a call: I got the job!

The next week (if I recall correctly) I started my new job and looking back, it seems everything kind of took off from then on.
Of course, as soon as I had started, my inbox piled up with emails from agencies I’d emailed 5 months ago who all of sudden wanted to meet with me (“Thanks, but you’re too late!”) and I finally managed to get a paying gig via Lost In Space which made for a few sleepless first weeks at my new job. I was working at Kleber during the day, but in the evenings I had to animate a PR movie for Websense — full PAL resolution in AE, on a tiny iMac. Because of the tight deadline, Lost In Space kept calling me at Kleber. And when I mean “at Kleber”, I’m talking about the office phone since I didn’t have a mobile then (I know, right!), and I remember being told that this couldn’t really go on obviously. Remember, this was something like 2 weeks in my new job and here I was blatantly taking freelance calls at the office! Pretty surreal looking back now… I stepped down from Lost In Space, so I could focus all my attention on my new job.

Stills from the Websense animation

Before that though I had to finish the project I was working on — impossible to do on my iMac alone. So during one sleepless night I worked from the Lost In Space office in Central London, then a place in South London (a friend of Lost in Space who offered to help out), and ended up in a post-production facility in Soho during the early hours of the next day before going back to work. But it finished the job, and that was my Lost In Space adventure over and done with.

Of course I’d be lying if Kleber was the only thing that kept me occupied since. The Summer of 2002 proved to be one of the busiest periods in recent years. Digital Vision approached me to work on a follow-up to the enormously successful Infinity series.

Image from my Inphra collection for DV

The first collection I had done for them was a lot of fun (and quite lucrative as well), so I didn’t hesitate to get involved for a follow up collection. This time however, I decided to create a complete collection on my own, instead of teaming up again with my pal Steven. I set out to create the 30 images during the two months in the summer. Thirty images quickly turned in to around 40 or more because of revisions and rejections. On top of that, Steven and I had started on a motion collection for DV as well — which was basically a version of our Infinity images, but animated. So here we were, each creating around 40 images and 15 to 20 video clips in the summer, meaning I spent every waking hour in front of the computer.

Both collections launched with the obligatory launch parties and press coverage, but personally I feel that we killed the whole style by doing the 2nd series and kind of oversaturated the market with these types of images. I don’t think it reached the popularity of the first collection — because by now everyone was doing them — and I haven’t seen anyone succesfully marketing follow ups or similar images later. It burned me out too. After having spent an entire summer creating image after image I was done with it, and gave me a feeling of “been there, done it, move on”.

Plan B Science & Entertainment v2, 2003

During that period (as if I wasn’t busy enough!) Ashley Wood and I formed Plan B Science & Entertainment, a design collective that was doomed from the beginning because we were both too busy with our own work to really make it work. It lasted long enough to get us finally together in Sidney (at Semi-Permanent 05) before we pulled the plug and moved on (we’d still do stuff together though).

In the summer of 2003 I started to get itchy. Up until then I had been using my personal/experimental site ximeraLabs as a portfolio space on the side (via sub domains), and I wanted to separate the “work” bit from the “play” part. More importantly, I felt I wanted to put my name to my work, instead of an obscure domain name. And so, in July 2003 I launched this site at the MadInSpain conference in Madrid.

Kleber’s East London dwellings

Meanwhile Kleber had moved out of its basement dwelling and moved to “trendy” Shoreditch for the next few years — first camping out at our friends Lateral, then settling in a little office of our own for the next 1.5 years — until we decided to get rid of the office space in 2005 and become a “virtual” company. Since then we all work from our own homes and stay in touch through the wonders of modern technology.

The Muller/Kleber/Mrs and Mrs M/Mam Tor design studio 2006-Present

What else is there to say? Since then things have been going great. Kleber has been going from strenght to strenght and personally, I can’t complain either (working from home is such a luxury!). In 2004 I became involved with independent comic/book publisher Mam Tor (by basically calling out Liam Sharp on a comic forum and saying “My design is better than yours!”), and subsequently published some award-winning comics — which led to much more comic related stuff in the years that came, culminating (so far) with the massive Comic Book Tattoo I designed with my wife Liz.

So that’s it. 1998 — 2008 in a few blog posts. On to the next 10!

When the collections were released it created a bit of a tidal wave in the design sphere. All of a sudden everyone was creating the popular “Emotional Abstract Visual Images” and every other day there seemed to be a company popping up offering the same services (and subsequently trying to poach the designers of DV collections to their side). All what mattered to me was that I had enough money in the bank and that I had a nice piece for my still non-existent portfolio.


One of the images of my DV collection

Actually, I had two noteworthy (to me at least) projects in my portfolio now — the DV images and the site for an artist called Ashley Wood. I’d been working on the site for my old local comic shop in Antwerp, and had decided to put in links to artist sites. I was a fan of Ashley’s work, who at the time was illustrating Hellspawn for Image Comics, and decided to drop him a line to say I had “featured” his site there. He thanked me for the link, and asked if I was up for doing his site, even though he couldn’t pay me. He completely understood if I wouldn’t do it for free, but it looked like too much fun to pass on. So I made a deal with Ash: complete creative freedom.
Seven years, 4 sites, a few books and lots of logos later we’re still chatting, and I’m still designing the odd thing for him when time permits.

ashleywood.com V1

Still no “real” job though. By now I was spending most of my time at home in a reversed routine.
I’d regularly work until 3-4AM, go to bed, wake up at 3-4PM and start over again. I was constantly working on my own stuff: creating new versions of ximeraLabs to keep it circulating on the portals, building a decent portfolio site and most importantly — make a giant list of every advertising agency, design studio, and web company in London to send my CV to.

Over the course of the next 4 months I must’ve approached around 70 companies. I even went as far as digging up contact info of marketing execs at movie studios in the vain hope to land movie site projects, with an almost unanimous response: “Thank you for your email. Please remove me from your contacts asap”.

During that time I wasn’t completely out of work. Through luck and persistence I had managed to land authoring gigs at publisher-du-jour Friends of Ed to co-author 3 books.
The first book, Photoshop & 3D was a success (and still available) so I got offers to write more, and I said yes to everything they sent my way. More on that later (have to keep it chronological here!).

In the meantime I started to get replies to my emails from a few companies. I think out of all the companies I approached, less than half actually took the time to reply. I’d sit up every time a new message “Re: Possible Job Opportunity” popped up in my inbox, but usually it contained either the automated “Dear Tom, Thank you for considering to work at XXXXX, but we’re currently not hiring. We will however keep your information on file in case a suitable opportunity arises!” response, or the possibly worse “We love your work! We’ll give you a call when we need you!” reply.

The ones that offered some ray of hope turned out to be duds as well after the obligatory interviews.
I was either too experienced for the role, too expensive, or — according to SCEE (Sony Playstation Europe) — not versatile enough in my work. My most spectaculair putdown has to be my ill-fated job interview with Foundation 33 (back when they were still around). They were incredibly nice people, and SMART. It was clear from the moment I sat down in their office I was in for a critical grilling. It didn’t help that most of my work was clearly abstract stuff with no meaning whatsoever, so when I was asked “What is the idea behind this? Why did you design it this way?” all I could do was stutter my way through a feeble attempt of explaining why I used 3pt type and random 3D shapes…

EXPLAIN PLEASE! One of the pieces that was over analyzed at my job interview

Anyway, they weren’t really looking for a web designer. Needless to say I didn’t get the job, but I learned a valuable lesson right then and there, and started to be far more considerate in my design work, and tone down the exessive visuals in favour of a more concept driven approach.

It was nearing November 2001 and still no work when out of the blue I got an email from Lost In Space (actually a really late reply to my “can I haz job pls?” email) inviting me over for a chat.
Lost In Space was high on my list of “desirable agencies to work for”, specialising in high-end graphics and VFX work. I met them at their Islington office and had quite an informal chat about my work. The Digital Vision images in particular was what had piqued their interest in me. They showed me their showreel — showing footage of Björk’s All Is Full Of Love GFX, Squarepusher’s Come On My Selector, graphics for the Bond movies, etc… — but of course I was already familiar with their work and had to hide my wide-eyed enthousiam and design geekery. Especially because in a dim-lit corner Alex Rutterford was working on what was becoming the infamous Gantz Graf video.

Alas, they couldn’t hire me because of the fact that work was slow at the moment, but were seriously considering adding me as a freelancer. We exchanged contact info and I left. Only to receive an email from them a few weeks later saying that they restructured the company, and were now working as an agency representing designers/directors — and it turned out I was on the books. Great success! It didn’t take long for press releases to appear announcing the news, and the lineup of designers. Things seemed to be happening for once, but at a very slow pace. My money in the bank was slowly running out, so I kept on the lookout for full time work.

Meanwhile I was keeping busy with Lost In Space, creating a motion reel of abstract 3D and working on broadcast pitches and moodboards which never materialized in paid work.

Then, in January 2002 whilst checking my list of agency sites to spam with more pathetic pleas for work I discovered that Kleber had a job opening for a designer…

Next: 1998 – 2008, part 5: Coming home.

Our flat in London — the “lounge”.

I shared a flat in central London with two of my workmates and it took the three of us the better part of the year to actually furnish it. Simple luxuries of furniture where an afterthought and we’d lived out of boxes literally — and used them to great effect to construct an entertainment set and a coffee table. No working TV either, so my trusty iMac served as a DVD player as we rented every possible DVD from the rental place down the street. I did have a proper bed though.

Hard at work at the Vir2L London office

I quickly got used to the high-flying dotcom mentality. Being a web designer was like a badge of honour, and there seemed to be a lot of us in London! Not that I met any of them regularly since I’d pretty much given up my social life in favour of design. I felt I had a lot to prove so I started working day and night on personal work, trying to keep up with the pace of everyone else.
Up until then I had never really considered creating self-initiated work and publishing it online, but because I was working alongside people like James (threeoh), Anders (Dform1), Bradley (Gmunk), Patrick (Supershapes), and my flatmates Erik & Phillip, I felt cofident enough to say to myself “If they can do it, I can too!”. Apologies for the blatant name-checking, I’m just trying to get a point across. Oh, and in the American office we had people like Michael Young and Justin Fines working.
I was in really, really good company to riff off.

Around August the whole Vir2L crew moved to their swanky East London warehouse space and from then on we pretty much spent every waking hour there, 7 days a week. Our daily routine would consist of getting in at 10AM (overpriced Starbucks coffee in hand), work until 6PM and then spend the evening working on our own sites until we got kicked out of the office. Repeat on weekends.

Inspired by the trend in webdesign of that period — that of very themed and object-driven releases (think VolumeOne, Future Farmers and the like) and abstract 3D — I started working on my own little corner on the web. It was only a few months ago that I was toying around with robot designs, and decided to evolve the concept further.

Atom 7, my Robbie the Robot

The result was Atom 7. I can’t remember why I settled on that name, I guess it sounded cool at the time… The highlight was a fake commercial I created, throwing everything at it: the tiny type, the spinning 3D, hyperactive flash bits rendered at 60FPS, layer upon layer of 3D shapes. You name it, it was in the clip. All because I wanted to prove that, yes, I could do those things too. Once completed I realized I got completely bored with it and moved on. So now — for the first time ever online… Atom 7:

Atom 7 from helloMuller on Vimeo.

Months went by, and I was still tooling away at my site. Out went the robot idea, in came a sort of abstract flash thing, which went out the door as well, and I was back at square one. I went back to Belgium for 2 weeks during christmas, and when I returned in early January a lot of things had changed overnight. The dotcom bubble had burst. Or at least there were some rather large cracks showing. We’d been hearing news of layoffs and company closures — companies like Oven Digital, Deepend and Razorfish were forced to close their doors, and finally the ripple had reached us. Half of the staff was on notice, giving them until May to find a new job. To my astonishment my job was safe, for now at least.

Another design for ximeraLabs that never made it online

Months passed and I still didn’t have a site. I finally registered ximeralabs.com around February 2001, as an incentive to stop messing around and actually put up something. So I started making holding pages instead of something more substantial.

The ximeraLabs holding page

While I was still fiddling around, James (Widegren) was working on the May 1st Reboot and asked me if I wanted to be part of it. The previous Reboot had proven to be successful, and this year he would open it to the public.
Of course I wanted in!
James added my site to the rapidly growing list of participants. I got listed on the first page at the 10th place, so I knew at least some people would click the link to my site. Better get my act together and do something… fast!

One night at the office we were all working on our sites, making sure we’d be ready for the now self-imposed May 1st deadline, when I was playing around with a Photoshop design I’d imported in Flash. By accident I’d created a colour swatch of the image and discovered I could draw shapes – with my image as its fill colour. RESULT! I was happy with the source image, but had no idea what to do with it. Now I did. I started breaking apart the image further, redrawing it, deleting parts of it, rearranging elements — and before I knew I had created a series of 10 different images out of just 1.

I ditched all previous ideas and decided to use these compositions as my site. I threw everything in Flash, added some pages — and the obligatory “Links” page and lo and behold, on the 1st of May – along with 1700 other sites – ximeraLabs officially launched. And just like that, everyone — in the design sphere at least — knew of me.

ximeraLabs version 1 (2001)

From that point things changed rapidly. Aside from constantly seeing the visitors rate of my site go up and up (forgive me, I was new at this, and thought it was incredibly cool to know that somewhere people were actually looking at my work), I used my newfound “popularity” to leverage some more exposure. Suddenly I was “one of the guys” and I started to randomly approach any project that was inviting designers to contribute: design books, magazines, web portals and the like and tried building a collection of personal work. The sky was the limit.

But then the sky got cloudy.

Around June we got a visit from the Big Chiefs, who flew in from the U. S. of A. (company laywer included) to let us know that “because of the current climate in the industry” (translation: “Our big clients don’t think this internet thing is gonna work, so they pulled out”) they had to let 95% of the remaining staff go. This time I was amongst the casualties, and I was introduced to the “American layoff system”: sign the papers, pack your personal stuff and GTFO! And so I did. I went to the local IT shop, got me an external drive, and went back to the offices in the afternoon (after the bigwigs had left), copied all my files and went home. And then went back to the office the next morning.

I didn’t have an internet connection at the flat yet since we spent most our time at the office anyway, so I used the office as my base for the next 2 months while I frantically put together a portfolio and for the first time started looking for work.

Not as easy as I thought it was going to be.

Next: 1998 – 2008, part 4: Can I haz job pls?

In my first post in this series I talked about the time I graduated and how I lucked into my first job by chance, and no experience whatsoever in the field I was going to work in: webdesign. The next two years (1998-2000 roughly), would be my trial by fire. Here we go once more…

August 1998, and I had my first job, starting at the bottom of the ladder as a “Multimedia Designer” at Vintage Productions in Antwerp – with a modest (very modest in hindsight) monthy paycheck. What can I say, I just graduated, was still living at home and thrilled to have job.
The first thing I learned was that time equals money – and that no matter how “artistic” you are or want to be, all that goes straight out of the window in favour of that magic word: communication. Admittedly, this was quite the steep learning curve – especially in the early days where I had tried really hard to infuse some sort of graphic design aesthetic into the work I was doing, and I quickly realized that it was pretty much in vain. The company I worked at specialized in the so called “below the line” advertising and B2B (Business To Business) communications – and that of course comes with a set of invisible rules. Most of my time there was spent learing HTML and Flash (for starters) while updating page after page of digital (i.e. web) product brochures until I could manage to operate Dreamweaver on my own without breaking the sites I was working on.

After a few months I “graduated” into my first full project – a customer-facing site for Contax and Yashica cameras

VICTORY! My first proper site, for Contax Cameras

I busted my balls on this one… I had to work within the framework of the larger site, meaning brand graphics (i.e. purple sidebar) had to stay. Everything else was (relatively) up to me. While I was designing the site I slowly started to discover design books properly, which I could afford now that I had an income. Of course, most of the books featured web design and included the now classic “Browser Project” books from Laurence King.

Finally having fulltime net access, I’d spend my lunch hours at my computer, books on my lap, entering one URL after another and having my mind blown away by what I saw was possible – discovering The Remedi Project, VolumeOne, Attik, TDR, kleber (yes yes!) Futurefarmers, Dextro, etc… . The sad thing was that I seemed to be one of the few guys at work to be genuinly interested in this, and most of the time when me and the two other guys tried to be somewhat innovative or tried to experiment, our creative director politely blocked our efforts, handed us a Photodisc “Business” collection and sent us on our way (OK, I might be slightly exaggerating here, but it wasn’t that far off).

Within my first year I was bumped up to senior designer and slowly but surely got offered more creative freedom. Not a lot, but probably just enough to keep me happy. The clients hadn’t changed, but now I had the chance to do more creative work on new projects and pitches.

Trying to break the mould for a Biosense pitch

Sometimes it worked, most of the times it didn’t. Doing work for people that essentially only look at spreadsheets, profit margins and sales figures is sometimes a thankless job. There were positives of course – I was learning new stuff at a breakneck speed. Soon I was pretty good at doing HTML coding, Flash animation and managed to add animation and 3D modelling (using Infini-D!) to my list of skills. I wasn’t making pieces of art, but one year on I started feeling quite confident in myself and felt that I could build a full site on my own.

My first freelance site for my local comic shop, Mekanik Strip in Antwerp. Animated GIF overload!

The first site I built myself — my first proper freelance gig — was for my local comic shop in Antwerp. It was great! They let me do what I wanted and in return I got an open tab at the shop (for a while at least). I crammed everything I’d learned on the job in there – ridiculous flash animations, framesets, popup windows, 3D – to show off my l337 skillz, and more importantly to satisfy the growing craving for more creative work.

By now I was at Vintage for well over a year. The company had moved from the 2 rented flats in the Antwerp suburbs to their new offices in the city centre (incidentally 5 minutes away from the comic shop). I was still happy at work – I got to do some trade shows abroad, which were a fun experience, but I started to wanting more out of my job. During that time I’d become quite versed at surfing the web, and had discovered all the great design portals out there: K10k, Three.Oh, Kiiroi and Holodeck 73 — those became my favourites early on — which showed an even bigger world of design I’d never seen before. And I desperately wanted to be part of it. As a result I started to work evenings and weekends on my own designs, instead of going to the pub, mixing design and 3D, emulating the styles I discovered and infusing it with the cyberpunk style of design that was so popular back then.

One of my very early personal pieces – a pun on Y2K and the fusion of Apple and Microsoft

Asimov – basic attempts to do some simplified 3D modeling and character design

A few months of this and I had created a very small body of own work. At the same time work started to become a drag. It was a good job, but closing in on the 2 year mark I felt I’d learned everything I could learn and it sank in that I’d never be able to do the stuff I really wanted to do for a living there. So I started to entertain the thought of leaving.

The problem was that, deep down, I wanted to go to New York, or London… well anywhere that seemed to have a vibrant design scene, because I couldn’t find anything like that in Antwerp or Belgium even. Especially in the type of work I wanted to do.

Disclaimer: I’m fully aware that is a very myopic view, but thats how I felt back then. Of course Belgium has a strong design industry and world-class agencies.

Of all the agencies I had discovered online, one in particular stood out: Vir2L Studios – an American interactive agency based in Washington (if I remember correctly?). The thing that intrigued me about Vir2L was the lack of client work on their site – especially compared with rival agencies like Kioken and Razorfish. No, their site was really selective in what they showed, the rest of the work – as the site itself – was more abstract design work. And that appealed to me. The fact that Vir2L was making waves online and that the whole company was a virtual (see what I did just there) Who’s Who’s of prominent designers made it look like an amazing place to work.

Around March of 2000, during my usual morning office routine (get coffee, sit down and check the design portals — something I still do) I noticed a very interesting post on threeoh.com: Vir2L was opening a studio in London and needed Dutch speaking designers!
This was my chance I thought, and immediately started putting together an online portfolio, which I hosted on the servers at work (not the smartest move as it would turn out) since I didn’t have any webspace of my own. I started emailing with James (Widegren — who ran threeoh and worked at Vir2L) and a few weeks later I found myself taking a day off and on the Eurostar towards London to meet with the MD of their soon to open London office for a job interview at a posh hotel overseeing Hyde Park.

I remember the interview being a relaxed affair, although I couldn’t make out if it was going to have a positive outcome. As it turned out, they hadn’t had a lot of applications for the position — something that gave me a glimmer of hope. If anything, at least I’d gotten a free day trip to London out of it.

Back home, I pondered the next weeks about the outcome of the interview, whilst having email conversations with the Vir2L MD about salary expectations and general info regarding the possible job. Around the end of April I finally received the email I was hoping for: I was hired and would join the London office in July.

Now of course came the difficult part: informing my current employers that I would be leaving. I called in my boss for a meeting and with a bit of hesitation told him I’d gotten an offer too good to refuse. He took it remarkably well. Too well I thought. He called in the business director, and he too seemed to have an “Oh yeah, no surprise” attitude. They told me they felt sorry I was leaving, and even tried to persuade me with the promise of a fat paycheck and a creative director position in a few years if I’d stay around. I didn’t tell them I was going make that fat paycheck in a few months (and again, in hindsight the paycheck wasn’t that fat either – but substantially more than I was making at the time).

The next few weeks I wrapped up work, had my farewell drinks and prepared for a new life in London. I already knew I was sharing a flat with two of my Vir2L workmates, who had scored a small flat on Exmouth Market – quite the hip/posh area in central London (with equally posh rent). I shipped over my stuff (luckily paid for by the company) and so finally around the middle of July I set foot at the Vir2L London office.

Next: 1998 – 2008, part 3: A Brave New World.

Out of curiosity I started digging through my archives (yes, I’ve kept practically everything on disk) and started looking through all the work I’ve done so far. It was interesting to discover that – even though I think my work has massively changed over the years – some sort of common thread has been running through my work: a love for comics and science fiction.

At the same time I’ve been flipping through my copy of the excellent How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy, and this all spurred me on to – over a series of blog posts – write about my education and experiences in design, the ups and downs, and how I learned from my mistakes along the way (never do 3D rotating logos or use lens flares “as a joke”).

Of course every story needs a proper setup. So instead of jumping right into the action, let’s rewind the clock a little.

I didn’t plan on becoming a graphic designer.
I kind of fell in to it. Having interior architects as parents had set me on a creative path for sure, but that path was largely determined by one thing: comic books. I got into them as a kid, and I’m still into them now. That obsession drove me through high school and college for the most part.
I wore my love for the medium as a badge of honour. Whenever I needed inspiration for a project, comics were the first thing I looked at.

After high school and a massively failed 2 year detour attempting Product Design I enrolled in 1994 in the Graphic Design & Advertising department at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts in Antwerp, one of the oldest art institutions in Europe and famous for kicking out Vincent Van Gogh and unleashing “The Antwerp Six” onto the fashion world during the 1980s. But that wasn’t the reason I went there. My parents studied there, my dad taught there and I ran around the hallways of the buildings when I was a little boy. In short, it was the easy choice.

Anyway,1998 arrived: graduation year. I had a computer, no internet and no clue what I was going to do after school. The thing was that I didn’t really feel I had a lot of prospects. Our teachers were all designers of the traditional kind to us. They worked either freelance or were part of small studio outfits that did nothing but book design, the odd museum or public service poster, and business reports as far as we knew. Some were illustrators specialized in childrens books. Basically everything I didn’t want to do. I wanted to do “cool stuff”. David Carson, Attik, Tomato and TDR ruled the world. That was what I wanted to do. The Cool Stuff!

For my graduation project I tried to combine all those things I wanted to do: comics, and “cool design”. The trick of course was to convince the teachers, who were looking for a subject worthy of a year long graduation project.
My first idea of doing a complete CI for my local comic shop (where I used to work) was shot down pretty fast.
In hindsight I can’t blame them – it was incredible limited in scope and not meaty enough to justify 10 months of work. But I still wanted to do something with comics! That was my goal – after 4 years I wanted to graduate with something that I was proud of and could use as a business card for job interviews.

So after some nerve-wracking days I had a brilliant idea: invent a book publisher of illustrated sci-fi books and design the whole identity for them, including one book. The pitch worked – it was a “proper” concept and although I had to convince the teachers that SF was a viable form of literature by throwing up the names of Asimov, Clarke and Gibson and their impact on popular culture they gave me the go-ahead.

The stage was thus set. I invented “Matrix Books” and chose William Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic as my book – the way I saw it I could flesh out a 16 page story with design and illustration and I didn’t have to lay out too much text.

The cover to Johnny Mnemonic

While working on the project I had an epiphany of some sort. One of the guest lecturers that year (who had studied at the college) came to tell us about this wonderfull thing called THE INTERNET and his 10 year carreer in Silicon Valley where he, among other things, worked on video games, websites and 3D animation. Right then and there I decided that I’d become a multi-media designer (as it was then called). The work I was doing somehow perfectly gelled with all this cyberspace stuff. Suddenly I realized I could earn a living doing all this, which looked like complete sci-fi to me (remember, this was the time when movies like The Lawnmower Man hit the cinema’s).

More graduation work: I, Robot cover made from the insides of a walkman

My whole graduation project was one giant excuse for me to just experiment like crazy in Photoshop. I was constantly maxing out the 99 layer limit and tried to cram in as much stuff as possible (as long as it would fit on a Zip Disk). Less is more didn’t exist in my view.

More Johnny Mnemonic

As part of the project, each student was also required to design and build a small website. Since time was of the essence, we were only taught the bare basics of HTML, GIF animations and rudimentary tweening in Flash. I spent weeks building 5 pages in PageMill using only paragraph and line-break elements to positions everything. Luckily they didn’t evaluate our coding skills.

When I finally graduated, I didn’t have the best grade in the world (a respectable 70%). Not too bad. My teachers patted me on the back for having made the finishing line, but I sensed that they didn’t really get what I tried to do. Except for the guest lecturer, who pulled me aside during our graduation show and told me he’d given me 90% because he’d gotten it, and encouraged me to keep at it. That vindicated everything for me. I couldn’t care less about my grade now. I knew I was on the right track.

Fine. Now all I needed was a job. Easier said than done. I’d planned to try and enjoy “my last summer holiday”, but my dad was adamant I had to step it up now. In the real world people don’t wait, so I spent a few weeks thrawling the yellow pages looking for agencies.

That summer saw another edition of the yearly Young Talent exhibition at the art gallery of my local comic shop. What had started with me and 3 friends during a slow period during the summer had by now become a somewhat national event that attracted wannabe artists from all over Belgium. So naturally I printed out some pieces of my graduation project to be included in the exhibit.

And then, on the opening day of the show the weirdest thing happened.
As I’m walking around the gallery I get approached by a visitor, a regular at the store whom I had failed to recognize. He starts asking me all these questions about my work and is getting quite worked up and fanboy-ish about it. He’s lavishing laying praise on me and the work, but there was an open bar that had been going for a few hours so I didn’t take him too seriously. The reason he latched on to me was because he’d spotted a fictious (and blatantly wrong formatted) URL on one of the prints and starts telling me about his buddy who’s really into motorbikes, who also works at an ad agency that “does all that computer stuff and you’d be perfect for it!”. After 30 minutes I relent and give him my phone number.
Eventually he dissapears, and I think nothing of it. The day winds to a close, and we all end up in the pub around the corner and proceed to get royally shattered.

The next morning at 9am the phone rings. With a hangover from hell I answer… and its The Guy From The Shop! He’s almost shouting with delight. He’d spoken with his friend the motorbike ad guy, gives me his number and tells me I need to call him the next week and then he hangs up. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it sure beat having to flip through the yellow pages! So the next week I call motorbike guy (his name was Gunther) who apparently already knew all about me and book a meeting with him on the Thursday that week. Crap! This is really happening!

On Thursday I put on my best clothes, pack too much work in my portfolio and manage to be on time for my meeting at the ad agency, with the classy name Vintage Productions. I get greeted by an American receptionist on the first floor and after some confusion end up in the kitchen on the 2nd floor, where I get greeted by Gunther (who I find out is actually the Creative Director) and Luc, the MD. After the required short intro and showing my work, they ask me what experience I have with websites. Sensing I’m way out of my league I sheepishly tell them I’ve used PageMill and GIFBuilder. They look at each other and chuckle – then tell me that “well, if you get the job you’ll learn to use proper tools”.
The discussion then quickly wraps up. They liked my work and the fact I graduated (“Its important that you can show us that you can start something and finish it.”), and after a fast tour of the company I got the “We’ll be in touch next week” line and get shown out.

A couple of hours later I’m home again when the phone rings. It’s Luc from Vintage. “Hello Tom, we’ve just been talking – and if it is OK with you, we’d like you to start Monday.” Whaaaaaaaaaat?! Trying not to yelp I tell him thats perfect for me, and that I didn’t expect a descision, if any, so fast. “Oh well” Luc says, “You’ll find out soon enough that things go really fast here. After you left we ordered your desk and computer. See you Monday!” *click*

That next Monday, I walked through the doors at Vintage ready to be thrown into the deep end head first…

Next: 1998 – 2008, part 2: How The Web Was Won.