Sven Uilhoorn

Interaction- and Game Designer from Groningen, the Netherlands
linkedin
2019
current

A Piacere

Board game about the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with players composing, performing, teaching and spreading rumors to score points, attend royal events and complete their legacies.

Game board with game pieces
2014
current

Compagnieën

Strategic and tactical board game about the Dutch companies during the Dutch Golden Age. Each player controls fleets to compete for the biggest profits, battle victories and settlement control and expansion.

Screenshots of the different pages of the Gibu website, both from the mobile and desktop version.
2016

Gibu Bestratingen

For paving company Gibu I designed and developed a website that shows their most relevant projects, explains their strengths, experience and process and let's potential clients get in touch.

View 2022 Concept
2020

Club magazine

Three 80 page magazines a year for a student squash club. They include tournament reports, squash related articles, interviews, quotes from members, reports and pictures from events.

2019

Website squash club

Former website for student squash club, aimed at serving existing members with news, forms and (members-only) photos and documents, while also serving potential members.

Frontpage of the CosyRacingCommunity website, showing the top half of the forum page with the navigation bar and current racing series boards.
2016

Cosy Racing Community

Website and forum for international sim racing community. A highly customised MyBB forum is the home of respectful, low-preparation, friendly but still competitive racing on Assetto Corsa.

Screenshots of different page types of the Schove Groep websites, both mobile and desktop
2015

Student Housing & Insurance

Two websites aimed at very different demographics. Student housing site serves housing for students and starters. Insurance site provides financial services and insurance aimed at medium income households.

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Design Vision

I think qualitative research is essential as a cost effective method to design interaction that's based on behaviour. Even low-cost user research through interviews and observation is highly effective for coming up with useful and intuitive solutions.

Interaction design is about behaviour. Therefore I think problems can only be correctly and with more certainty be indentified, tested and solved by observing real users performing realistic tasks in a natural setting using actual content.

Books

Especially after my studies I've read a fair amount of books on interaction design and product design, like:
Visual Thinking for Design
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People
The Design of Everyday Things

Game Design books I've read multiple times are:
The Art of Game Design
Game Design Workshop
Fundamentals of Game Design

Tools & Skills

I work daily in software like Photoshop, Illustrator and do front-end (HTML/CSS) stuff regularly. I've built Wordpress themes from scratch and heavily customized a MyBB installation.

Working in teams of course would mean expanding to tools like Sketch. I'm a quick learner and enjoy learning something if I will actually use it on a frequent basis.

About Me

I play squash, swim, football and do diving board tricks. Strategy board games like El Grande, Concordia or my own games take up most of my Friday and Saturday evenings. Musical interests include jazz, hip-hop, drum and bass, house, world music and electronic.

Since 2009, and until 2016 as a team of up to six staff, I run an online simulation racing community. Since 2017, I give squash training. I'm now able to set up anything from one hour clinics to year long programmes up until my own level.