Hi there,

Welcome to my website and nice to meet you! Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Wouter Achterberg. I am eighteen years of age, born on the 19th of April. My hometown is Culemborg, which is situated in the centre of the Netherlands. Since the 2018/2019’s academic year, I moved to Enschede in order to start studying Creative Technology. This website functions as my personal portfolio, so you can find all sorts of projects on here.

Feel free to look around!

Final Module Expo

This was a module with a lot of different aspects. What is most important, is that I had a lot of fun with all the different projects I made. I have made posters, wrote several programs and had fun guest lectures and workshops. One of the workshops was about JavaScript, which was really interesting! The assignments which took the most time were for programming and the project for the interactive video.

The one of the interactive video also is the main object discussed on this part of the website. Together with Dick, Jesse, Suzanne and Jelise we made an interesting interactive video. It is about a drug deal which takes a sudden and wrong direction. We had thought of some clever situation like the screen when you had to make a certain decision. The video starts in the forest and ends in a creepy, dark room.

On the 11th of November, we all had to be present at the SmartXP, in which everyone showed their final product. There were amazing videos, e.g. the video of Sven and Antoine.

Peer review

Overall the website does not look amateur. The identity of the website could have been more clear, since there is a lot of black and white without any colors. This also makes the website less personal, since it is very abstract. The description for every article is clear, but I am missing some contact information, which could have been added relatively easy! The design is structured and clear. It is very simplistic and it is clear that he preferred the color black. The choice of this color however could give a very dark impression.

Next to that, there could have been better outlining of several items, i.e. the navbar. The blog is ordered neatly and is structured in chronological order, which is good! The simplistic design is consistent throughout the whole website. I do miss the personal touch to the site, it could have been a WordPress template as well. I enjoyed the content and would say that there is sufficient content regarding quantity and quality.

There are a lot of different projects and he elaborates on them well. His texts are readable since the text is white on a black background. A sticky navigation bar would have been nice to see. His portfolio page uses a nicely structured image gallery, which also functions as a link. The images are big, which is great, because the content appears to be clearer.

What I learned from reviewing this website is how well-structured website keep your attention easily. While everything is black and white, it still is very clear and you are not distracted by other objects on the website. I personally like colors more, but this reviewed showed me that it is possible to achieve the same goal with different methods. Click here to enter his website.

Personal touch

All over the website I added a personal touch. First of all, I wanted to create one long website, which means that you have to scroll over one webpage to see all of the content I have to offer. One of the other important aspects on my websites is that all the images you see on the website, are made by myself. I think that is very important to give the website a personal touch by using only your own photographs/images.

As the style goes, I like to keep it clear with a crisp contrast. All of the sections that contain content are desaturated, which gives it this black and white effect. In between the main section I used my own photographs, which enhances the contrast feeling. Also, I created my own logo in photoshop for the homepage. The logo enhances the professional, clean font I use throughout my website. I wanted it, just like my other content, to look professional. That is also the reason why it is white with a look-through which reveals my background.

Lastly, I created a subtle movement to the inspiring words on the bottom of my homepage. Also, there is an arrow on the bottom of the page which intrigues people to scroll down, since it jiggles when people hover over it. (I show my prove for styling in CSS by combining two images into one image. Left side is part of my CSS stylesheet and so is the right part of the image.)

Design progress (18-09-2018)

Awesome. You have made it this far into my website! As you
probably already noticed, I hence a very clear structure on my website. It is
important for me to create a website with only one webpage which is very long.
I personally think that this looks clean and professional. As to the design progress,
I have not made a sketch, since I already knew what I wanted to do beforehand.

To make my website personal and give you a real taste of
what my work and projects look like, I only use pictures that are made by myself.
I took these photos over the last couple of years with my photo camera and or drone.
The visual structure is also important to me. Al the content is situated on
top of a black/white photograph, which makes the content pop out more. When you
scroll down to the next part of my website, you can have a look at a photograph
I took in a parallax context. I chose these photographs to be in colour in
order to have the main focus on the parallax photographs and not on anything
else.

Besides that, I think it is important to have the navigation
bar always near you to use. That is the reason why I stuck the navigation bar
to the top of the page so it is always there for you. I will have main parts of
the website, such as Home, Blog and Projects stuck on the navigation bar. The reason why I did not include every
single part of the website, is because people need to scroll past every part
manually in order to discover my entire website. Also, I do not have a sketch of my website and how it shoudl look like, since everything I create is spontaneous.

Design progress (25-09-2018)

So there has not changed that much on my website since last
week. I have tried to make everything hardcoded as responsive as possible, but
there are some parts that are very hard to make responsive when you are coding
your website yourself.

What I have added to my website is the part where I showcase
my work/projects. My idea was to create a responsive grid layout with different
images from different projects next to each other. When you click on the image
you will get a manual slideshow which will allow you to take a closer look at
my projects. The explanation of the projects is on a separate page, which you
will find when you scroll down, or when you click on the link below one of the
images.

Next to that, I decided to add another blog post regarding
my progress. I decided to place this blog on the same pace as the previous blog
on my progress. So far, so good!

GOGBOT 2k18

On the 6th of September I visited to the 15th edition of the yearly GOGBOT exposition on the old market in the centre of Enschede. This years theme was “Future Flash 200 – from Frankenstein to Hyperbrain”. This was obvious the moment you entered the old market, since the atmosphere was freaky and futuristic at the same time. Everything was present, from a VR experience in which the future was recreated till an autonomous robot band, which processed MIDI files into acoustic music. Just like the other years, the Creative technologists represented the University of Twente with nine different installations.

The installation I admired the most was Kørb, which comes from the Latin word Corpus, which means body. They recreated a human skull with a lot of futuristic details. Half of the skull was normal, while the other half of the skull was covered with gears. On the back of the skull there also were some brains hanging out. The mouth still had teeth in it, and was completely moveable. From the skull downwards there were various tubes, which represented the nervous system in the human body. Through those transparent tubes were led lights installed, which showed different colours depending on the situation. Underneath this nervous system was a motor which stimulated an artificial, 3d printed heart. All of these hardware features were controlled by the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, situated in the skull. Also, there was a camera in one of the eyes of the skull. The most amazing part of this installation, besides the fact that it was physically stunning, was how everything worked. You had to stand on a certain spot and the camera would then scan your face, redirect this to an internet page from Microsoft, which could recognize your emotion. Based on your emotion, the mouth would open and the skull would say something related to your emotion. The tubes would also colour in such a way that it would be related to your emotion (darker colours for sad/angry emotions and lighter colour for happy emotions). The heart would also beat accordingly. The reason I liked this so much, is because it reacts in different ways to your input. Some of the installations would only have one output, but this installation had movement of the mouth, audio, colour changing led lights, the beating heart and most importantly, it recognized your emotion!

  


Drawing is very relaxing and calming for me. In my leisure
time, I always find time to draw for a couple of hours. I have done several
things regarding drawing. Recently I found out about drawing on black paper with a white pencil and other coloured pencils. Next to that, I like to re-create other people’s work (especially regarding graffiti). The shark was made by me last year. It was made because I wanted to experiment with drawing on black paper.

 Photoshop/After Effects animations: More recently I started focussing on computer related design and decided to start working with animations. The animations were created by myself, including the design and sound. The whole cartoon looks as an easy-made cartoon, but the reality is different. The cartoon is a composition of different layers made into one smart vector. Next to the cartoon itself, I made different mouth configurations for different vowels etc. This vector then got transported to After Effects, where I had to move frame by frame to mimic the exact mouth configuration to the sound it was making (I had sampled my own voice). After two hours of work, I got an animations which still is not finished. The animation so far only lasts 5 seconds. This was made by me last summer. The reason being was the fact that I had never worked this way in After Effects before. Its purpose was to learn more about the features Photoshop and After Effects have to offer.