I’m Ruben van der zee, born 1987 in Harlingen, the Netherlands (where I still live right now).
I’m a huge Tv Series and Movie fanatic on which I spend a lot of my time. But I also don’t mind reading a good book from time to time. I don’t really see myself as a hardcore gamer because I usually don’t spend a lot of time on one game. However, I have played a huge amount of casual games on my iPod Touch and Nintendo DS. Every now and then I really like sitting down with a couple of friends and play games on one of my consoles (N64, Gamecube or PS2).
I became interested in graphic design in the first place because of movies. I was interested in the way they make special effects. After I finished secondary school (VMBO) I went to an open house of the Friesland College, where they showed me some 3D projects. This is why I chose to start an education there. I started the MBO Education Medewerker Beheer ICT (MBI) in 2003 at the Friesland College. For the most part this education was about gaining technical computer knowledge, but it did contain some design aspects. In my spare time I started to familiarize myself with Adobe Photoshop, which I enjoyed a lot and it has grown into a big hobby of mine. I graduated after 2 years in 2005.
This is when I started the MBO Education multimedia design (also at the Friesland College) which was completely based on design. This is where I got interested in webdesign and spend a lot of time on it during the education, I even did my internship at a webdesign company in Franeker. I graduated after 2 years in 2007.
Because of the many design aspects the previous education contained, I could immediately start in the second year of HBO education Communication & Multimedia Design (CMD) at the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden (NHL). I wanted to broaden my horizon during this education, that’s why I chose to start with a 3D project for my first minor. During that project I got hooked on 3D modeling and after that I chose other 3D and Gamedesign projects. I loved to see the reaction of people when they played around with the games that I helped to create, which was something I didn’t really have with webdesign. I did my internship at Triangle Studios in Leeuwarden, and graduated (within 3 years) with a cool gamedesign project in Juli 2010.
After school I’ve worked in Utrecht at Cartel Internet en Marketing in a support function for about 2 years. After which I got a job offer from Zeedesign, which gave me the option to move back to my home town and to focus more on my actual web development interest.