Hi there! 👋 Daan here. Just a quick note to say this page was created in 2012. It got me the job and I worked on awesome projects at The Guardian for more than 4 years!
Hello Guardian Interactive team. I’m Daan and I want to do my internship with you.
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This is me. I’m a 21 year old, quite tall guy from Rotterdam. I’m an interactive designer who has a passion for code. Next to that, I love music, art, culture and all things interactive.
After leaving journalism school, four years ago, I decided to start studying Communication & Multimedia Design at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The school for journalism was a bit too old fashioned for me and I decided I wanted to focus on new and innovative media, to build and design things that could tell a story, instead of telling stories myself.
After four years, 13 projects, 10 books, 21 teachers and 5880 hours of studying, I’m ready to graduate from this university. Although I’m now more into design and new media, journalism always kept interesting me. I’m fascinated by the innovations happening in this field, but I also notice the lack of innovation and creativity of many journalists when telling their stories. This is why I think it would be great to approach journalism as an interactive designer during my graduation. To do research on how journalists can break out of the some-text-and-nice-picture storytelling mode and come up with other ways of telling stories that will suit the story better.
I’ve done a lot of projects the last couple of years. Thanks to these projects I developed skills as designing aestethic and clear interfaces. Building stuff with HTML,CSS and jQuery (also in superturbo-mode). Experimenting with Arduinos, Processing and MaxMSP. And I developed an antenna for all cool things happening on the internet. I worked on a few concepts for festival reporting (for example: Rewire interactive timetable, Urban Explorers live mashup and the Rewire Facebook report). I worked on an awards winning iPad app for highschool students. A few weeks ago I won the Rotterdam Open Data Hackathon with a webapp that could check how long a second-hand car would last. Right now I’m working on an alarm clock app that lets you sleep whenever there's a traffic jam on your way to work (using open data).
During my graduation I want to research (interactive) storytelling in journalism. My goal is to make a toolkit for journalists that can help and stimulate them to tell stories in another way. As the smartest and most innovative newspaper in the world, The Guardian would be the perfect place to do this research and to work on such a tool. So if you’re interested in this subject and you're interested in having me, then let’s talk sometime :-).