A brief history of me
My name is Willy Bergsnov. I live in Oslo, Norway and I made this website as an outlet for thoughts I have regarding the industry in which I work; web- and graphic design. It is also ment as a source of information about me to potential clients and employers.
Born to create
I was born in Kristiansand, Norway Dec. 2nd 1970. I grew up and lived there until I discovered the World Outside. I spent the nineties doing what I loved most; travelling and surfing and windsurfing.
I spent winters in Hawaii, Australia, India, Indonesia, Nepal and other countries. This shaped me as a human being, and hopefully made me a more open minded person than I would otherwise have been. I fell in love with Indian culture and history, and I even studied Indian languages for a while.
I have always loved drawing and designing stuff, and when I got my first computer – an Apple Macintosh LCII with a Stylewriter 1200 and Claris Works in 1994, I immediately started exploring it’s potential as a design tool. I was let down by the poor quality of the printer and the lack of intuitive drawing programs for the Mac.
Exploring the computer aided design process
In 1997 I got a more powerful machine – a Mac IIsi upgraded with a 100mHz Daystar PowerPC card and a Syquest drive. This machine could run Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and I soon found myself designing posters, CD-covers and websites for friends. This really taught me designing for print the hard way. I knew very little about CMYK-separations, colour management, typography and printing limitations when I first started out, but every time I talked to the printers I would drain them for knowledge and I read absolutely everything I could find on the subject.
Designing for print is made much easier today with a better, digital workflow and better, more forgiving print presses. Still I’m glad I learned the trade the hard way as I think it gives me more insight in the limitations and possibilities of the whole process of turning an idea to something you can hold in your hand.
Turning professional
While studying at the University in Oslo I was doing more and more design work for friends, and soon for friends of friends, so in 2000 I decided to start doing it for a living. I set up Mother Ocean as my personal firm and settled down in Oslo. Running a one man business is a very fun and learningful experience. It exposed me to all the aspects of the trade; marketing, selling, designing, educating, etc. I took all kinds of projects I could get – nothing was too big or too small. I was constantly afraid of turning down jobs as I never new what next month would bring. This is the curse of the freelancer and of course it made me overwork.
Working class hero
In November 2006 I was approached by Visendi, a Norwegian advertising and web developing agency , and I was hired immediately after a brief interview. Visendi struggled with their own, self developed CMS when I first arrived. It was the buggy remains of a quite good for it’s times system developed in the end of the nineties, but Visendi was not staffed to modernize it. I introduced them to Open Source – mainly Joomla! , and this is now the basis of Visendi’s web strategy. I spent more than two years at Visendi, met some really nice and talented people, and learned a lot.
These days I spend my days designing websites for a small design agency – Huset kommunikasjon & design as. I still use Macs and I still use Illustrator and Photoshop. The last couple of years I have done all my coding in Coda, an truly excellent application from Panic, the guys behind the famous FTP-client Transmit. My hand doesn’t like to play with mice anymore, so I us a Wacom tablet instead.
