Well, it’s that time of the year again, I’ve packed my bags and me and my girlfriend are off to celebrate 3 days of guaranteed fun at Lowlands 2008. Lowlands is a musical festival, with a huge line-up of artists, cultural events, and great food and people. It’s the third year I’m attending.

This year’ll be quite different than the last, as I’ll be taking my iPhone 3G, and I’ve also taken some time apart to make a beautiful and well-optimized web application for all attendees with iPhones and iPod Touches; LL4iPhone. With permission of the festival organisers, I could use some of their decals and branding in the app to give it a consistent feel. It was quite an interesting personal assignment to flex my poorly trained Javascript and PHP muscles, but it worked out quite nicely in the end. You can check it out at LL08.com (you’ll be automatically taken to the web app if you’re on an iPhone); it’s entirely free to use.

I will also try to update with pictures and text from twitter and perhaps even this blog post by using iPhone applications, if my battery levels allow it. If you’re at Lowlands, give me a call or email so we can meet up!

I’ll be going places this August, combining holiday with my favorite pass-time (that’s work, in case you’re wondering), and I’d love to meet blog readers, clients, and other familiar faces when I’m in their vicinity! I’ve got two places that I’ll be attending for a significant amount of time, and if you’d like to meet me, be sure to drop me a line!

So where will I be? As with last year, I’ll be attending the Dutch musical festival ‘A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise 2008’ (links to last.fm); I can’t reveal my share of the custom design work I did until the festival’s commencement date, but if you’re attending, I can guarantee you’ll like it! The festival is split up in three days, and if you’re there, be sure to email, text, or call me to set up a meet (details can be found in my vcard on Icon Designer) – it’s always fun to get together.

More exciting (and outlandish) is my prolonged visit to the United States from August 21st to September 10th. I’ll have a week of vacation with my girlfriend from Sept. 3rd to Sept. 10th, and the rest of the days I’ll be working on something fantastic. I’ll be in San Francisco during that entire time period, so if you live near, or happen to travel there, be sure to contact me. I really look forward to seeing San Francisco (and the US in general, I’ve never been there before) and all the designers and great companies that take up residence there. Vacation tips are, of course, also appreciated!

It was a real challenge getting my girlfriend on a plane, as paper tickets are no longer used, and her surname is too long to fit on an e-ticket reservation, Expedia refused to offer her any service (any. Really, I’ve been told by an Expedia supervisor that she just flat out couldn’t travel at all), but fortunately it appears that the airline, BMI, has been very kind with us and solved all the issues with the reservation. We’ll even be on the same flight back, in two adjacent seats. In the end, it even saved me several hundred euro’s. So a tip for all of you; just don’t use Expedia.

That’s it for this short notice; I’ll be updating the blog soon with more released projects and work, and I’ll probably do a few posts from these two trips too, so you can stay informed of my adventures. I hope to see you there!

Priidu Zilmer, of zilmer.com famehas a nice post and Photoshop sample file available for those of you that want to make crisp Webclip icons for your website. Webclip icons are the images iPhones and iPod touches use when adding a website to the home screen. Since I can’t use a web application for iPhone when the icon sucks, I urge those to whom it may concern to check it out.

Incidentally, this is my first blogpost made with the iPhone native application ‘WordPress’. I like it so far!

Since we’re steadily moving towards fully appropriating and settling into our new studio (home/office), I’ve posted a few pictures of our new location.

If you’re Dutch, you may recognize the artistic direction of the building as ‘de Stijl’;

(… De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. [It] advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — [members of de Stijl] simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. – wikipedia )

The similarity is not coincidental, as the entire block was designed by the founder of de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg. As such, we considered it to be the perfect location for such a graphic studio!

Feel free to check out more of the images on our flickr.

Because there’s life in the blog yet!

In the last month and few weeks, I’ve had an astonishing time in my life where I had a hectic moving of home and office, a set of challenging projects to work on with hugely talented people and world-class products, and other time-consuming challenges I had to overcome to get back to my regular life. As a young individual running his own startup business, it’s not very easy to get a mortgage and to learn about everything that comes with such a big step in life. I’ve also released a few details of what I’ve been working on, with a lot of updates coming soon, including the long-awaited Orion Extended freeware icon set that’s fully ready for replacing the system icons on your Mac or PC.

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