Tagged: self-employed

Acht verschillende schilderijen van een kat met een gitaar in de stijl van Picasso en Kandiski, gemaakt met AI Stable Diffusion

Artificial intelligence: threat or opportunity?

Artificial intelligence, we’ve seen it coming for years. And in recent months there has been a kind of breakthrough. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) appears to be able to write texts and create works of art. But how good are these systems actually? And do they represent a threat or an opportunity for human creatives? Illusion It happened many times before: people losing their jobs because computers do their work better and faster. But until recently, writers, artists and other creatives could cherish the illusion that this wouldn’t happen to them. Progress However, progress cannot be stopped. High school students already have… Read More

Map of the Netherlands made out of scrapwood, rotated 20 degrees anticlockwise, with next to it the Dutch lion as a recessed surface in the concrete of the wall

How to Crop a Country – The Netherlands in Scrapwood

The scrap wood map of the Netherlands is a good example of digital recycling. A map of the twelve provinces, made from old planks, slats, boxes, scaffolding wood, plywood, floorboards and similar scrap. But what is actually the most economical crop for that map? Advice Sometimes, when I get stuck during a design process, I ask the Facebook panel for advice. Social media is a blessing for the self-employed: since I no longer work in an open-plan office, I can not walk up to my colleagues anymore to ask them what they think. In those cases, I ask my friends… Read More

Screenshot of the WordPress dashboard with a post about WordPress plug-ins under construction

WordPress: my favorite plug-ins (and a theme)

WordPress is the most widely used content management system on the internet. If only I had known it when I started my own company 3Develop in 2013. At that time I’ve put a lot of time and energy into building my own website. I already knew a thing or two about html and php and with some modern stuff like css and jquery I managed to build a digital billboard that I was quite happy with. Complexity The disadvantage of this approach is that small adjustments, for example adding new work, take a relatively long time. With a relatively static… Read More

Tweet about railway station Rotterdam Blaak, mainly in blue and yellow, the colors of Dutch Railways

Twitter’s temporary decline?

I quietly started a tour along the social media. Previously I wrote about Instagram and Pinterest; today I want to talk about Twitter. The springtime with all its tweeting birds is an appropriate season for that, isn’t it? Toptweets And just like those two previous articles, I wanted to illustrate this blog post with my most successful tweets. But unfortunately, Twitter’s analytics have their limitations. You can view your statistics per period of up to three months. And then you can only rank the toptweets by number of impressions (and not, for example, by retweets or likes). The pictures in… Read More

Overview of all the Pinterest boards by Frans Blok/3Develop: webshops, photography, artist impressions, digital art and inspiration

Pinterest for Self-Employed Creatives

Of all the social media that emerged over the last few years Pinterest doesn’t seem to have a very cool reputation. The digital pin board is suffering of an image problem: it is thought to be populated primarily by elderly women who use it to exchange knitting patterns. There is of course nothing wrong with that. But apparently as a social medium you’re only taken seriously when you’re used by trendy food vloggers (Instagram), bored adolescents (Snapchat) or populist politicians (Twitter). Visual But on reflection Pinterest appears to have a much more diverse group of users. Women are, indeed, the majority, but one-third of all… Read More

Card house constructed with the use of 3Develop business cards, with the firm's Dudok visualisation in the background

Launch Party with Apple Pie

When you call your company 3Develop and you were already planning to start a few weeks before Christmas, December 3rd is of course the best day. 3Develop, 3 December, you will never forget that date. And also that apple pie became historic. Launch Baking pies is not part of 3Develop’s core business. And yet the first product was an apple pie that was cut on December 3 at about three o’clock at the launch party of the new company. The pie, in which the 3Develop logo was incorporated, tasted excellent. It was suggested on social media that it was burned… Read More