About
About me:
My name is Robin Van Rijn, originally from Bedford and from a 2nd generation of dutch immigrants that made it over to UK post war. I’m 27, balding, tall and very deaf. I studied visual media in Brighton University 2006–2007 and HND course in Bedford college 2003–2006. I’m interested in creating photography, films, animation, printed artwork as well sound and installation art. I work as a web designer full time and I currently live in Luton, UK with my girlfriend.
Why does the site exist?
This site exists for the purpose of being a stage and sounding block for my non commercial artwork. It also acts as a visual online note/scrap book for day to day documentation of thoughts and ideas. I hope that will help me to map and navigate my creative impulses more purposely. So as to solidify them into to projects of greater depth, merit and intent. It will also hopefully become an archive of my projects to date. So that I can hopefully compare and contrast my work over time. Which is currently an aim of mine.
History:
I feel I began my journey to create more meaningful and fulfilling artwork when I abandoned the need to paint and draw around the age of 19. This happened whilst in the refines of Art A level course. I found the course, qualification and process to be soulless and ultimately redundant. Whilst on the course for 2 years I never produced anything of merit either aesthetically, personally. It simply did not serve my needs intellectually or emotionally. While I’m not a anti–Stuckist I don’t feel these mediums had much for me and always felt confided and stuck within their limitations. After enrolling on a HND multimedia class at Bedford university with the aim progressing my career with the aim of becoming a multimedia designer, I learned about installation art, video art, film, photography, documentary production, graphic design and web design. I instantly felt more at ease about art, creativity and expression than the many years I was forced to hold a paintbrush. As such the course fuelled my interests in design and art and I became engrossed aesthetic semiotics, enigmatic films and post modern art. It was also around this time I found a great interest in art rock, post rock and experimental music and started going to gigs on a regular basis.
Current:
Since then I have been producing artwork in a range of mediums and have been part of art collectives, bands. I have also exhibited artwork and helped curate festivals and screenings. While I enjoy theory and intellectual discourse with my own artwork, I try to keep over-analysation of the form and journey of my work to a minimum and strive for natural progression from idea to final piece.
Career:
Sometime from then to now I managed to have career in commercial design. After university I began freelancing as a graphic designer and then from 2009 I’ve worked nearly exclusively as a web designer ending up in a junior role at a brand. As such please tolerate and expect some projects and postings about comercial design and web design as a whole.
Major projects:
- Collectives:
- WDT / VSTM
- Bands:
- Bride of the atom
- Horselover Fat
- Films:
- Canidae — Chapter 1
- Piano Tragic
- Installations:
- Ikea 2005
About this site
The background is a collage of various found photos, textures and objects as well as my own photos and I have collected over the years. The foreground imagery of the dog silhouette is a still from from Andrei Tarkosky’s Stalker and the quote is from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
Grid
Ivo multimedia runs on a 960px grid with a unit size of 18px.
With main content with 510px and a Sidebar 270px.
Padding and Margins of the headings, paragraphs and lists also run on single or multiples of the unit size.
The grid and it’s elements are fixed sizes and use px rather than ems, as such the grid is not at this point fluid and will only work on normal resolutions.
CMS
This website runs on WordPress using php and html 4 and css 2. At the time of static html design the site was w3c valid, as was the css. I think by adding a cms it has broken the valid html, which is crap but at least I’m honest. I use a few plugins such wordpress cache, facebook share and an integrated facebook commenter. This site also acts as a feeds to my tumblr and facebook accounts.
Fonts
The font’s I use are combination of Georgia for serif for body copy and a custom web font called Bebas for headlines. My font stacks look like this:
Headings:
font-family: BebasRegular, Futura, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
Body:
font-family: Georgia, Times, “Times New Roman”, serif;
There is no syntax for the grid and is mostly child paragraphs within content divisions, there is no footer (yet). The structure of the site works with both and uses both WordPress categories, posts, pages and tags.
