Amsterdam, January 26th, 2023

Linktree is a company that provides a platform that makes users’ online content more discoverable and easier to manage. It enables creators, brands, artists, publishers, agencies, and businesses of all sizes to curate a place where they can share, sell and grow. In 2021 it enabled over one million artists to generate 90 million streams across platforms.

Jesper Vos is the Principal Creative Technologist at Linktree, based in Amsterdam. In an interview with TIA, Vos described his freelance career and his current role at the company. He highlighted the honest and humble culture at Linktree and gave suggestions on how to create your own brand as a freelancer and to work with different clients.

To kick things off, in your opinion what’s the best thing about your city?

Amsterdam is one of the most important startup-hubs in the world. A lot of talent from across the globe has moved here for a job. In turn this has stimulated many other tech companies and agencies to open up offices in Amsterdam. There’s a lot of opportunity here for somebody like me and a lot of international people to synchronise with.

But even though Amsterdam is known as a major world city, its city centre with neighbouring burrows is actually very small. Combined with a strong biking culture—and incredible infrastructure to support that—a bicycle ride will take you wherever you want to be in no more that 20 minutes.

What’s a regular day like in Jesper Vos’ shoes?

Every day starts with a good home brewed coffee. I really enjoy the ritual of preparing my own espresso and frothed milk for a flat white.

Occasionally I synchronise with my colleagues in Australia at 8am before starting my own work. Depending on the phase of the project I will sketch ideas on my iPad, design concepts in Figma or build a prototype with Javascript.

I’ll quickly eat some lunch before syncing with my American colleagues at 3pm. Depending on the workload I’ll call it a day around 6 or 7pm.

This is my time to relax. I really enjoy cooking. Especially Chinese food.

Due to the global spread of our team I sometimes have to do another call at 10 or 11pm.

Can you tell us about your personal journey and your current position at Linktree?

I started my first job as a developer in 2014 besides my bachelor studies in interaction design at ArtEZ high school of the arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Quickly after graduating in 2015 I moved to Amsterdam and started with Build in Amsterdam where I really learned the craft of bespoke web design and development. I made new friends and was often hanging out with people working at other studios and agencies. I got along well with the Resn team and took my chance to join them in 2018.

While visiting my friend Baptiste in Los Angeles I met a few more people from the digital creative scene. With one of them I got a long really well. When we met a year later again in Berlin we decided to start a collaboration and do some work together. This quickly escalated which made me quit my job and start a freelance career.

Marvin Schwaibold and I continuously evolved our ways of working which turned into a very strong partnership.
While improving my skills as a developer, with every step I made in my career I focused more and more on creative direction. When it was time for the next step, and we joined Linktree together, I decided to move away from being a full-time developer. As a principal creative technologist I research ideas for the future of the product and validate these with interactive prototypes.

How would you describe the creative culture at Linktree?

It has been interesting to see how different nationalities shape company cultures. Northern Europe and North America have a work-hard play-hard mentality, while the southern hemisphere seems to take it all a bit easier and focuses on a healthier work-life balance.

It’s a very honest and humble culture with great benefits to a healthy lifestyle.

What steps have you put in place to guarantee innovation on the projects developed?

The squad I work in is not expected to ship any new features. This frees us from working with any guidelines, libraries and frameworks. We can really push our ideas into any direction and push them as far as we want. We constantly verify and iterate on our own work by building interactive prototypes. Something that might sound good on paper or look good in Figma might not work at all when put into practice. We notice this all the time when testing our own prototypes.

Tell us about a recent project you’ve worked on that you’re proud of. Which was the greatest challenge?

Unfortunately there is not much I can share about the last year of work as what I do at Linktree is very classified. I did work on the website rebrand though. Right when I joined the company the direction of the web design went into a different direction from what the team had been working on for months. I was assigned to help out since there where only a few weeks left before the deadline. Without much onboarding I started prototyping some of the animation concepts. Before I knew if I was fully in charge of every animation on the website. I decided to make every animation interactive for some extra playfulness. Because of the short deadline I had to iterate quickly on my sketches and figured I’d do this best with the framework I am comfortable with—Vue. Unfortunately the team was building with React which meant I had to do a few sessions with my coworker to translate all the code. It turned out to be pretty straight forward in the end.

How does the process of creating your own brand as a freelancer go?

Constantly sharing good work and experiments on Twitter has absolutely increased my visibility. I have never really worked on a visual brand identity for myself. I let my work speak for itself. My current portfolio website is actually built on this concept. It’s very undersigned and overloads the visitor with content, emphasising the projects themselves.

I also try not to be too influenced by trends and find my own tone of voice. This makes it easier to stand out and get recognised.

What do you feel are the keys to success when working remotely with a team?

It is very important to keep each other updated on your process. When working together in an office this happens very naturally, but when working remote this is a disciplined task. When most of the communication is async it’s crucial to leave detailed comments on your own work and follow any communication rituals.

During the European winter season I work on a 10 hour timezone difference with my Australian colleagues. I have to be flexible to join a meeting early morning or late at night. Every now and then we all have to make a little sacrifice to our free time to connect in real-time.

What recommendations would you give to clients to help streamline the process between their vision and your process?

Trust is the key to great collaborations. And that’s not just between the client and I. In 2020 I worked on a project for Madeleine Dalla—a New York based photographer. I was developing the website, Marvin Schwaibold took care of art direction and design, and Yaël Bienenstock was in charge of motion design. This was the first time we all worked together. Madeleine gave us full freedom, but we also had to trust each other to get to a great result. We did not work with the traditional waterfall method. Instead everybody came up with ideas for every facet of the project. Through sketching and prototyping we iterated over tons of ideas and managed to land on a super clean but outspoken brand identity that delicately accentuates Madeleine’s photography.

In your opinion, what’s the most exciting part of working in interactive at the moment?

Technology is evolving incredibly fast. New opportunities arrive all the time. It’s very exciting to see what people do with machine learning these days. But what I am personally most excited for is the time when augmented reality will take off. I truly believe it will be the next big thing after the smartphone.

What is the best advice you can give to young creatives aspiring to move into a career in this sector?

Don’t overthink. Get started and practice as much as you can. I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the good stuff out there, but don’t overshoot. Get comfortable with the basics and go from there. It takes time. We all started from zero.

Three top tools you can’t live without?

Nothing romantic about this one:
Mac
iPhone
AirPods

How do you keep up to date on industry trends?

Twitter and Youtube, but I try not the be too inspired by trends.

What’s the next skill you plan on learning?

I’m currently learning how to build a complete SaaS product from scratch, but I’m also really keen to learn more about machine learning.

What do you like doing in your free time?

Cooking is one of my favourite things to do in my free time. I really enjoy hosting (or attending) dinner parties with my friends. On new years eve I hosted an asian inspired dinner. My friends prepared spring rolls and amazing sticky pork rib bao’s while I folded 150 dumplings with 3 types fillings.

Thanks Jesper!

• Follow Jesper Vos on social media:

Linktree

Twitter

creativesFreelancinginteraction designInteractiveLinktree