Contact
Artificial Entropy / Aernout Peeters
Navanderstraat 8A
3039VM Rotterdam
The Netherlands
T +31 6 41038608
E info@artificialentropy.com
I'm a 31 year old freelance interaction designer from Delft, The Netherlands and hold a master's degree in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology.
Feel free to contact me, whether you're looking for conceptual design or for more straight up visual design. I know my way around PhotoShop, Illustrator, Maya, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript (MooTools), Flash/ActionScript and can handle myself using PHP. I am a designer first, but I just love making things work and the process of prototyping in particular, so don't hesitate asking me about developing as well. Currently, I'm looking into Kohana (as an alternative to CodeIgniter), Flex and into iPhone development as well.
When I'm not designing, building or ranting, I'm probably watching a movie, series (goodbye BSG), playing a game, taking pictures or reading a book. I might also be drinking a beer.
Origin
Artificial: "Made or produced by human beings rather than occurring"
Entropy: "Lack of order or predictability"
These words combined make (no, no, not Captain Planet) somewhat of an oxymoron, yet apply in multiple ways to Aernout Peeters, MSc. Here at Artificial Entropy, Aernout Peeters designs and builds. You might even find him ranting about this and about other cool things as well.
Fueled Lego and later on by Lego Technic in particular, I have always liked to create things (thanks mum & dad). Video games and other digital art made me realize that computers could be used to create wonderful things. When I had to pick a university, I was really looking for a good balance of science and art.
While not completely what I had expected, I eventually found my way at univeristy with interaction design. Through a research prototype I had built for a course, I was offered to do a research project at the ID-StudioLab, where I resided a couple of years as a member. My interest in 3D landed me a job as a teaching assistant for fellow member and friend Daniel Saakes in his course. I returned once more to do my graduation project for my final thesis.
For my freelance work, I decided on an acronym first. Throughout the years people have felt the need to point out the spelling of my name, an "e" following the "A" being rather uncommon. Now, it's my trademark. Both the words I chose refer to both my work as well as to my personality.
Website
Initially, I just wanted a simple platform to show examples of my work and hobbies, through which I'd learn a bit of PHP and expand my knowledge of HTML and CSS. At that time, Ruby on Rails was gaining traction, which made me want to use an application framework for a simple CMS. Because of hosting and performance concerns, I ended up using a framework based on PHP instead. Enticed by this framework and effects produced by Javascript frameworks, it became a bit more complex than anticipated.
The basis for this website is provided by CodeIgniter, a PHP framework, loosely based on the Model-View-Controller pattern. Of course, there are more PHP alternatives to Rails, such as CakePHP and Symfony, but this one provided some advantages, especially for someone with little PHP experience. While the out-of-the-box performance turned out to be great, the documentation (videos seem to be a must for these kinds of frameworks) is extensive and it's very easy to set up.
JavaScript frameworks are great if you want to spice up things a little bit. My framework of choice turned out to be the right choice for the wrong reasons: I loved its accordion interface effect and thought the animations looked really nice, but this is only part of its real potential. Initially an effects add-on for Prototype, today MooTools makes writing JavaScript code a joy and can be very powerful in the right hands. The price for being powerful is that its threshold tends to be a bit high compared to other frameworks like Jquery for example.
Smultron proved to be more than capable text editor and it being open source basically makes it a no-brainer if you're doing casual coding and markup. However, when Panic released Coda, it was too hard to say no. If you have a Mac, work on multiple websites and need a good workflow, I can heartily recommend Coda. It's well worth the money; while I got mine cheaply from a friend who wasn't doing anything with it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat at full price.