Arjen de Jong

Lead Designer at Essense

I believe great design cares about people, craft & authenticity. I love to create wonderful things from the ground up.

—

My Story

Current activities ...

As lead designer at Essense, I’m adding innovation strategy & UX design skills to our already brilliant crew. I’m also currently account-lead for one of our key accounts. We partner with our clients to discover & deliver value for their business, their customers and society. Essense clients are ING, Vodafone, PostNL, Philips, amongst others.

Some fancy terms related to my daily activities; design thinking, user centered design, online strategy, agile scrum, design sprints, LEAN start-up, co-creation workshop, customer journey mapping, digital transformation.

CX strategy85%

UX Design100%

Creative lead80%

Hardware

For me nothing beats pen & paper in the early stages of the creative proces. But Apple products have become a standard tool for me, ever since I was introduced to one at Graphic Design school. It could only run one program, in black and white. But we were certain this was the future. Looking back, to use Apple as a great example of a user -and design-centric succes may seem rather unimaginative. But in the early days of Apple, in Holland only the small design community embraced the 'Apple Macintosh', because it simply made our work easier and more fun. By daring to be different. By innovating.

1995

Macintosh SE/30

(Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam)

1997

Performa 6400

2001

Powermac G4

2007

MacBook Pro 17"

2003

Powerbook 17"

2010

iPad I

2011

MacBook Pro Unibody 17"

2013

iPad mini

2016

MacBook Pro retina 17"