Hi, I'm an Interaction Passionate.

My name is Koen Houtman, born in 1991 and ever since I felt that the creative industry was my purpose of life. Since 2009, I am getting educated in Interaction Design in Utrecht (the Netherlands). I already learned a lot about design and coding, and discovered many things from which I thought they didn't exist.

Everything I see and do in my life are like new lessons to me, everything is usable in Design, and that is the best lesson I've ever learned. Therefore, this website is dedicated to the progress of me becoming a well-skilled Interaction Designer and Developer.

Portfolio

Projects

My Landingspage

My Landingspage is a web-app build by me and is coördinated by my companion and college classmate, Nicky Schaafsma. It's about a personal landingspage where users can insert their favourite links and therefore use the app as the first page when their browser opens, so they got all of their favourite links when they'll need them.
This app is an open project, and therefore, new features will come with the time. That is because of the "widgets" that we added. Widgets are similar to apps, and they'll give some more functionality to the users content. They are able to switch them on or off. Widgets can contain several handy tools, like searching google, calculate some math or even update your facebook status or send a tweet. It's free to use and pretty simple as we implemented a nice native touch.

Why don't you give it a try? Click here to visit My Landingspage.

To be presented soon.

Milestones and Accomplishments

School Progress (Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht):

65% - Currently in third grade, preparing for internship

Design Skills Progress:

55% - Overall Webdesign - Mobile (web)Design - Overall Graphic Design - Typography Basics - Enhancing small details - Moderate Photoshop skills

Web-development Skills Progress (basics):

85% - HTML(5) - CSS(3) - JavaScript - jQuery - Ajax - PHP - MySQL - Responsive Webdesign (basics) - Mobile Webdevelopment (jQuery Mobile)

10/20/12 Playgrounds Festival

Pretty wicked, got invited to support my school with some of my works at the Playground Festival in november. It's a festival about design and art and 4 graphic design schools of the netherlands are participating in a race among - "Who is the best?". I'm rather delighted that they asked me. Somehow it feels like a prestigious thing.

09/19/12 PICNIC YOUNG '12

This was a subproject of the PICNIC festival about art, design and technology in Amsterdam. We gathered around with a few other youngsters and with the help of socratic conversations, we designed a new vision on education in the future. Connected with a lot of people there, who filled my head with new inspiration and knowledge. It was a great opportunity to share thoughts with other individuals from all corners in the industry.

09/08/12 Narrowcasting project

Couldn't have asked for a more awesome project: the school has asked me and my fellow classmate Freek van der Horst to design and develop a Narrowcasting system for the entire school. A touchscreen where students can get current information about their schedule and see work from other students in the school. Also messages from the schoolboard and twitter feeds are being displayed there. We just started designing, I'm getting more excited when I see the quick development of this system! I will post it under the projects section once it's finished.

08/20/12 Yes! Got a place for my internship!

I'm very proud to say that in February 2013, I will do my first internship at Label A, in Amsterdam! It's a great company and they create some good looking websites, web apps, apps and all sorts of interactive stuff. I feel like I can learn a lot from those guys, can't wait!

06/27/12 Graduated to 3rd grade, with awards!

Had 2 years of interaction design, 2 more to go! Got to the third grade and won some prestigious awards. A charter for best concept and a cup for most progressive student. It really boosted my ego up a bit, but I guess sometimes a compliment like this is what makes you more motivated and is earned well for some hard work at school.