Kapellen, Antwerp, Belgium. Born to Hans and Veerle on a cold winter’s night.

I am nothing if not a stubborn student, and youthful impulsivity makes me leave school. I need to learn a trade.

I sign-up to a form of part-time study (now known as ‘DBSO’) and start an open internship at Agfa Gevaert. By what I still perceive as chance, I’m assigned a role as documentalist with some of my duties involving designing books and manuals and publishing to the Internet.

I’m sold.

The summer of ’97 unexpectedly leads me to South Africa where I’m destined to follow in my father’s footsteps as proprietor to his industrial air cooling companies.

Needing to learn the trade, I work away the days in the workshop and mines and breweries of Southern Africa. Being a geek at heart though, I remain drawn to colours, letters, numbers, shapes and figures. Soon enough I convince my dad my passion lies elsewhere by converting his complex and manual calculations to Excel and offering them as on-line tools.

Shortly after, I am to go study advertising.

I convince the owner of R & B Paving, a local masonry, to go half-price on our new driveway in return for a new logo, brochure and website.

Armed with a copy of Macromedia Freehand and WS_FTP, I go to work. I didn’t know it at the time, but this first project would fuel my drive toward entrepreneurship, setting me on a course I was only beginning to uncover.

While studying, I befriend Brendan Scanlen, an event promoter in his spare time. Being house music fans, we hit it off instantly and as Brendan goes on to organise events nationwide, I help him get the word out.

Internet access is surprisingly prevalent and I simultaneously produce an interactive invitation (using Macromedia Flash) for every paper flyer I design. The flyers, sometimes cryptic, usually playful, repeatedly go viral (though I didn’t use that term back then) and contribute to an already very dedicated mailing list.

My life in South Africa comes to an abrupt end and I’m forced to leave the country (and with it, my trusty Austin and Morris.)
I return to Belgium.

Accepting this new course, I start employment at Kleur & Beeld, a midsized design agency in Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands.

The company is at the forefront of web-to-print technology and it’s an inspiring time and environment.

Through the invaluable support of great colleagues, I learn a lot, including how to program software.

I launch san630, a design weblog.

What began on a whim—its name inspired by my car’s license plate—grows into a popular resource on graphic and web design culture. Though it’s eventually discontinued after the domain is hijacked, its legacy lives on. To this day, I use the username ‘sans,’ which conveniently translates in French to ‘without.’

My employer merges with a larger group. It’s a hard time with an unexpected increase of red tape. “Innovation culture” has yet to be invented but I find myself confronted with its sudden loss.

Being brazen (and unfulfilled as an employee), I set out to become independent by starting my first company; the curiously named Alles Past (or ‘Everything Fits’.)

For reasons now unbeknowst, I’m fascinated with the image of a ring toss game as a logo. Its use doesn’t last long though.

Working from a spare room, and with help from friends and family, I quickly land my first clients.

I take up work for electronic controller manufacturer E.D.&A..

They become my first ‘bigger client’ as an independent professional and working with them teaches me some very valuable lessons, including time and project management.

To thoroughly follow up on the multitude of tasks (including this very extensive logo exploration in 2013) E.D.&A. are so kind to assign to me, I build a custom task tracking and project management app which I nonchalantly call ‘Mijn Project’^※. Although it never reaches a public release, it does get picked up by my clients and colleagues and goes on to be a tool of choice for nearly a decade. Meticulous asset management, in particular, becomes an essential part of my services.

^※ I assumed translation would be gratuitous.

I launch humhum, a bulletin board for (European) creatives.

It’s a private and highly secluded online retreat and home to some of today’s world’s leading artists, designers, creatives and programmers (and continues so to be.)

Around this time, I release Lilisto, a personal bookmark manager. It’s pretty innovative from the go, offering new concepts such as dynamic categorization, advanced sorting and auto-suggesting similar favourite links. I’m in a position to iterate fast and the service booms, growing to more than 250.000 active users in a few years (who collectively manage over a million unique URLs).

The website grows to being amongst the 100.000 most visited websites, as ranked by Alexa. I’m young, impressed and… inexperienced.

I fail to monetize and, ignorant of potential investment, become a victim of my own success. Unable to upkeep server costs, the service intermittently yo-yo’s and goes down in 2009.

Three years later and feeling encouraged by user feedback (and less cash-strapped), I attempt a revival by rebranding and rebuilding but it’s too late. With web browsers having vastly improved their own management and a market now saturated with similar offerings, abandon rate is high and the service dwindles and eventually dies out in 2014.

Moving away from Alles Past, I found LogoDebut in 2009. At the time, I feel Alles Past as an agency is too traditional in its structure (having learned it so) and come to believe clients prefer more options.

I turn the boat and launch as an ‘online agency’ where clients can form their own ‘graphic design packs’ at a fixed price (to some dismay of my colleagues), book meetings, give feedback on concepts and download their deliverables, all on the website. It proves popular. Over the years to come, I (well, we) end up designing hundreds of logo’s and identities for startups, entrepreneurs and small business.

My local watering hole at this time, OCTO in Antwerp, is in dire need of ‘branding’.

Happy to help, I draw an ambigram (and all-time favourite logo of mine.) The sisters Blokzijl, who run the bar, and its clientèle embrace the new mark like I’ve never seen and my work finds a permanent place on cars and lamp posts and ankles and wrists. A very rewarding feeling.

I help co-founders Sandra Aerts and Nico Huybrechts with naming and branding their big data start-up.

We settle on dataSHIFT as it embodies their strategy. An early version of the brand uses the Rubik’s cube to symbolise piecing data together.

Inspired perhaps, this project also marks a shift in my design approach. Ideology becomes a stronger basis for aesthetics, helping me grow as a strategist.

The Vlaams Huurdersplatform (VHP) is a tenant interest group which combines and supports the Huurdersbonden (the Flemish tenants’ associations) and VIVAS, the network for social tenants. To create and promote unity, I am requested to rebrand the group as a whole and develop an all-encompassing brand system.

Though all members within the group share a common goal, their particular activities, core audience and outreach couldn’t be more different, oftentimes resulting in a communication mix and match. I choose to reuse key elements of the Huurdersbonden and VIVAS, as supported by VHP, and bind each member using a single element.

To emphasize transition, independent websites are fused into a single platform, each with their particular content and outreach programmes. Testament to my hands-on approach, I also build a dedicated intranet allowing nationwide knowledge sharing.

I’m invited to create a brand design and strategy for Life Expert Centre, a highly specialised medical center in Leuven, Belgium.

Of particular joy and result in creativity is the work my friend and architect Manuel Gordts and I do dressing up 30 running meters of walls inside the centre with custom interior graphics. We go on to found Parlay, a multidisciplinary partnership.

The late summer of 2016 finds me amidst silk fabric samples and hexagonal patterns. Having always been somewhat of a dandy, I adopted wearing (and appreciating) those ‘colourful handkerchiefs, folded and tucked playfully inside a jacket’s pocket’ soon in life. So much, it eventually inspires me to found Two Fold Square, a brand of pocket squares.

I immediately strive for its premise to be different from those I owe myself, though. A ‘TFSQ’ pocket square must be fully unique (with only so many of them produced) and designed by an artist (whose story inspires the result.) I call in the help of Geertrui Storms, a former intern and amazing hand lettering artist, to draw edition I.

Online sales are slow but steady (but offline soars and I’m alive with enthusiasm) and I’m soon joined by my friend Gunter Zoetaert with the intention to expand. We release edition II and III simultaneously and aim for expanding into the retail boutique market.

Two Fold Square teaches (and continues to teach) me a lot of valuable lessons. Finding the best combinations in supply chain management, balancing both on- and offline sales and remaining vigilant in a luxury market saturated with offerings remains a challenging but inspiring feat.

Longstanding client Simbolo—a maritime consortium I’ve worked with since 2000—requests a next-gen Track & Trace application for one of their companies.

Their original, self-built solution, developed piecemeal over the years, is showing digital wear and tear, impacting user retention and, more critically, the company’s image. Partnering with iTEQ Rotterdam, the provider of the group’s core infrastructure, I design and develop a mobile-first, user-friendly alternative that quickly becomes a primary customer touchpoint.

I’m hired by Antwerp based pharma start-up HEW to create Tinge, a natural cosmetics brand and rapidly push their launch to market.

Duties include brand discovery, activation and design and developing marketing strategy.

2018 is an exciting year. Two Fold Square is gaining traction, and LogoDebut is growing. Life is smooth.

I move into a swanky office and hire employees—a bold financial move in Belgium. But it doesn’t last. Overdependent on too few clients, I’m eventually forced back to working solo.

Growth takes on a new meaning—it’s now about personal development. I start to pursue a balanced life, blending work with travel and a healthier work-life rhythm.

Dr. Nathalie Cools asks me to devise a brand presence for H2020 ReSToRe, a research project working towards a cure for multiple sclerosis. For the mark, I depict a dendritic cell, capturing the essence of the technique. Identity, website and a social campaign follow.

That same year, the European Transport Safety Council in Brussels becomes a client I’ll design and build sites and event brands for, for years to come.

Something is shifting. I’ve always designed and developed, but the two are no longer separate offerings. A brand is now discovered, designed and built end-to-end, by one pair of hands. It’s how I prefer to work from here on.

With LogoDebut in a steadier place, I make room for ideas of my own. Working solo again means invoicing is a chore, so I start designing unyok.io, an invoicing tool. It never reaches a release beyond my friends using it, but the knowledge I gain from it is invaluable.

In similar vein, I launch textcharacter.com, a browser for symbols and emoji and my first steps towards automated development.

Neither is a business (yet.) Both are a first foray, in over a decade, into building something because I want it to exist.

Lilisto taught me the hard way; this time I keep things small.

The world comes to a standstill. Clients pause, events vanish, and I find myself with a larger suite of projects to look after than ever before, now that nobody travels and everything has to work online.

More covid. Lots of home, lots of quiet.

Luckily, work continues for me. Thermo King and Legero provide me a livelihood in a world that is buckling for many, and I don’t take that lightly. I walk, read and cook, and quiet suits me more than I expect.

Russia invades Ukraine. My wife at the time, Alina, is Ukrainian, and we set up Arts for Ukraine: a platform to help artists fleeing the war find their footing, and an audience, abroad.

Identity, website and socials in a matter of days, in fact. We act fast, we get it out, we help in any way we can. Heart-driven work for once, with no brief and no invoice. It reminds me why I learned to do all of this in the first place: to be able to build something when it matters.

Large language models arrive on my desk, and I let them in. First as a curiosity, then as a colleague: drafting, refactoring, voicing, generating.

I explore eagerly and sceptically at once, building small experiments to learn where it’s brilliant and where it’s confidently wrong. It’s the most exciting shift in my tooling since the web itself, and the year I stop asking whether to embrace it and start asking how.

I pivot completely. Rather than a wide spread of clients, I choose depth. I dedicate myself to my existing clients and start considering new ones as a treat: only the work that really triggers me.

Fewer clients, longer relationships, more responsibility. Less pitching, more building. I find I prefer it.

I rebuild how I work. AI agents move from novelty to workflow: coding sessions become conversations, briefs become tightly constrained prompts, and a lot of repetitive work simply disappears.

It isn’t magic. It has to be reined in constantly and will happily overengineer if you let it. But, interestingly, it teaches me to become a better programmer. Concepts that were steadfast in me for years simply go, by seeing the agent suggest something else and me reviewing whether and why it’s right. Twenty-five years in, I’m being taught again, and I like it.

Thus far, the product year. With a workflow that finally scales, I return to products of my own: Sponto, real-time event discovery; Postuur, set-and-forget Instagram posting for creatives; and Freshet, commercial WordPress plugins. Even Lilisto gets a brief reboot.

I’m once again building things because I want them to exist—only this time with the experience to keep them alive.