Graphic design - background
As with every talent, you can already see it as a child.
Sebastian’s mom still talks about the drawing competitions Sebas would enter. He actually won most of them. Back then, it was still a hobby, but it soon became his choice of study. Already in high school, he chose for “Graphic design” and later on, towards the end of high school, he chose to specialize in “Print Media”. He wanted to learn more about the technical aspects of graphical design. At that point, he was already more skilled in design than the courses he could get about design at school, so the choice was easy.
Inventive, proactive and creative
Sebastian told us about the teachers he had in the last years of high school. A lot of the time, they weren’t there. That’s why his class of 4 students (yes, printer is an endangered species!), had a lot of ‘study time’. In the beginning they got to do games and so on, but those were only fun for a little while. Sebastian got bored and decided to look for things to learn himself. During one of those free hours, he ran into a teacher that was busy printing. He asked that teacher if he could explain how the machine worked and it didn’t take long before Sebas started printing himself. A couple sessions later the teacher trusted Sebas’ skills enough to leave him alone and that’s how Sebastian turned a difficult situation into a learning moment.
When they had to choose a subject for their ‘final project’, their minds were quickly made up. They were printers in the city of Turnhout, a city famous for its playing cards, so they decided to invent a set of playing cards from scratch. They designed, printed and finished them completely themselves. Their teachers, naturally, became the faces of the cards: there was a Jack, a Queen, a King, and ofcourse, a Joker. Cartamundi, the reference when it comes to playing cards and also located in Turnhout, were more than happy to provide actual playing card-paper, when they saw Sebas’ designs. Sebas and his team printed them out and used varnish to make them playable.
Back to his roots
His Photoshop-skills brought Sebastian to a crossroads in his life when he was at college. He already received many assignments to design and edit pictures for a whole bunch of his friends and acquaintances. Eventually, he chose for hands-on experience and started building his own brand. We’re a few years down the line now, having finished a couple hundreds of designs and you can still notice his learning curve today. He’s always very eager to learn and he tries to develop himself every single day by gaining new experiences, never shying away from a challenge and learning new techniques.
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Written by Cédric