Jesper Bentzen is an interaction designer and art director who has been working with digital design and visual communication for over 10 years. He specializes in concept, design, and direction for interactive media and moving image, including websites, apps, commercials, music videos, and corporate identities. He has a reputable client base including Madonna, Sony Playstation, Vodafone, and MTV. Bentzen also runs MAGNET, a studio specializing in design for moving images. He handles concepts, design, production, direction, etc. for all kinds of digital media. Bentzen has won many awards in the web design and motion design industry, and has had his works featured in magazines, books, and exhibitions. His work is very interesting and funny, especially his animated short The Salesman. Check out his website for more info: http://work.jesperbentzen.com/
Category Archives: Interaction Designers
Ever wonder who is the creative genius behind all of google’s holiday and specialty logos? Well that would be Mr. Dennis Hwang. Hwang was born in Tennessee but moved to Korea when he was five, where he grew up and went to school. When he was young it was frowned upon for him to doodle as he did, but professionally they turned out to be very beneficial for him. Hwang graduated from Stanford with a degree in arts and computer science. He was working for Google as their international webmaster, where he was responsible for all of their international content, when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked him to become their chief google doodler after the popularity of their burning man logo. Hwang creates about 50 google logos each year for holidays ranging from Christmas and Easter to more obscure events such as the anniversary of Pinocchio’s publication. To check out all of the google doodles designed by Dennis Hwang as well as other guest designers, go to www.google.com/doodles. 
Mark Zuckerberg, who if you have a facebook or are even alive in this day and age I’m sure you have heard of, is a computer programmer and internet entrepreneur with a net worth of $15.5 billion. In his days as a student at Harvard, he and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook in 2004. When Zuckerberg was in middle school his father taught him Atari BASIC Programming, and he tutored with software developer David Newman. Zuckerberg caught on quickly, and when other kids were playing video games, he was creating them. Zuckerberg loves programming, especially communication tools and games. In 2010, Zuckerberg was named the number one out of 100 on Vanity Fair’s “most influential people of the Information Age” list. He is definitely an influence to society today, and I doubt that he will begin to lose popularity anytime soon.
Tantek Çelik is the Web standards lead for Mozilla Corp., parent company of the Firefox web browser. His main objective at this job is to raise the bar in what web developers expect web applications to support. He wants to help browser-based applications built with HTML5 and CSS3 rival the interfaces and social networking of iProducts. Çelik has worked for both Apple and Macintosh, helping to develop the Mac OS version of Internet Explorer. Over the next few years, Çelik will be working on making the user interfaces of HTML5 and CSS3 web apps ahead of the times. I am curious to see how the web will be changing under his direction over time. He predicts that the web will continue to rapidly evolve over the next few years, especially due to advancements in mobile technology/internet, so it will be interesting to see what it becomes!
Sources: tantek.com, Mozilla, Tantek Çelik
Theresa Neil is a User Experience design consultant for web, desktop, and mobile applications. Since 2001, she has designed for various markets including finance, digital marketing, systems management, etc. Her favorite projects are those with data visualization challenges.
One project of Theresa’s that I am fascinated with is an iPhone app for the University of Texas at Austin. The app is very clearly organized and extremely easy to navigate. The app includes all of the information students, faculty, alumni, or friends of the university might need to know, and the information is organized in a way that is very easy to find. There is even a section for puzzles and games! The layout is similar to the setup of the various portable iDevices, with simple icons arranged in a 3×3 grid. The icons lead to such things including university news, maps, a directory, an events calendar, sports, menus for on-campus restaurants, safety & alerts, and personalized things requiring a login id for your class schedule, dining bucks, blackboard, and finals schedules. Theresa did a fantastic job combining functionality, business, fun, and unity into one very handy app. The app is free to download, so of course I did to try it out. It is absolutely fantastic! I wish West Chester had an app like this! (that’ll happen when pigs fly. And if it does, it probably won’t be as easy to navigate….. just saying.)
Source: http://www.theresaneil.com/
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