3Develop image blog

visualisatie, ontwerp, fotografie, stadstours / visualisation, design, photography, city tours / visualisierung, entwurf, fotografie, stadtführungen

Category: Various

The final result of the numbers challenge: numbers 1 through 100 in a large variety of colors, fonts, materials and situations

Photography / Various

The Numbers Challenge: Found Footage

The world is full of numbers. Some of them are very photogenic. They are made of a special material, have a striking color combination or they are beautifully affected by the ravages of time. I have photographed many of them over the years. But if you try to capture the numbers from 1 to 100 one by one, in order of appearance, how long will it take you? Longer than you might think, I discovered.. Number one It was on a bicycle path near the fortified town of Hellevoetsluis that I got a brilliant idea. Or let me rephrase that:… Read More

Screenshot of the WordPress dashboard with a post about WordPress plug-ins under construction

Various

WordPress: my favorite plug-ins (and a theme)

WordPress is the most widely used content management system on the internet. If only I had known it when I started my own company 3Develop in 2013. At that time I’ve put a lot of time and energy into building my own website. I already knew a thing or two about html and php and with some modern stuff like css and jquery I managed to build a digital billboard that I was quite happy with. Complexity The disadvantage of this approach is that small adjustments, for example adding new work, take a relatively long time. With a relatively static… Read More

Tweet about railway station Rotterdam Blaak, mainly in blue and yellow, the colors of Dutch Railways

Various

Twitter’s temporary decline?

I quietly started a tour along the social media. Previously I wrote about Instagram and Pinterest; today I want to talk about Twitter. The springtime with all its tweeting birds is an appropriate season for that, isn’t it? Toptweets And just like those two previous articles, I wanted to illustrate this blog post with my most successful tweets. But unfortunately, Twitter’s analytics have their limitations. You can view your statistics per period of up to three months. And then you can only rank the toptweets by number of impressions (and not, for example, by retweets or likes). The pictures in… Read More

Detail of a knitting pattern of the Rotterdam skyline

Various

The Rotterdam Skyline Knitting Pattern

3Develop, the reliable source for all your knitting patterns … I have the feeling that a lot of my blog posts start with “… is not 3Develop’s core business, but …”. This is one of those posts again. Graphic skyline It is yet another spin-off of my Rotterdam skyline project. I made this graphic portrayal of the city’s skyline a few years ago for a contest. Which I lost ingloriously but since then the picture, in different versions, has started to live a life of its own. It hangs on walls, it adorns birth announcement cards and on April 9… Read More

Overview of all the Pinterest boards by Frans Blok/3Develop: webshops, photography, artist impressions, digital art and inspiration

Various

Pinterest for Self-Employed Creatives

Of all the social media that emerged over the last few years Pinterest doesn’t seem to have a very cool reputation. The digital pin board is suffering of an image problem: it is thought to be populated primarily by elderly women who use it to exchange knitting patterns. There is of course nothing wrong with that. But apparently as a social medium you’re only taken seriously when you’re used by trendy food vloggers (Instagram), bored adolescents (Snapchat) or populist politicians (Twitter). Visual But on reflection Pinterest appears to have a much more diverse group of users. Women are, indeed, the majority, but one-third of all… Read More

The Forest Planetarium of Arnhem: eight stainless steel spheres in the Cold Pond in Sonsbeek Park

Space art / Various

The Arnhem Forest Planetarium and the Lost Planets

A few years ago I had a brilliant idea: a scale model of the solar system with the size of the municipality of Rotterdam. Just because it’s important to see the bigger picture, to know which larger system we’re a part of. And because it’s fun to be amazed about how big everything is. And how small we are ourselves. Streetplanetarium The city of Rotterdam is a very suitable place for such a streetpanetarium because there is a long trail of port areas attached to the city. Therefore, the distance between the center and the extreme outer regions is so… Read More

Machine heads for a guitar with baroque decorations

Photography / Various

He says an old guitar is all he can afford.

Sometimes I’m amazed about how cheap some things are. Who would have thought, for example, that my old guitar could be repaired for less than ten euros? I’ve been playing this acoustic guitar for decades. It’s just an avarage instrument, nothing special, but that’s okay because I’m not a gifted guitarist either. At a campfire I can provide some rhytmic guidance to the singing, and that’s about it. It’s impossible to figure out how old the instrument is, but a few stickers on the back, with fading psychedelic colors and nineteen sixties typography, suggest that we might have the same… Read More

36 photo's from Frans Blok's Instagram account

Various

The Instagram top 7 – my most popular images

How do you find out what your most liked photos on Instagram are? I expected a button somewhere that would provide that information. Unfortunately, it turns out that there are only some apps that can do the job but they have their limitations. The only way is to go through all of your photos, manually write down the markings and put them in the right order. Instagram is a social medium that you can’t afford to ignore as a photographer and / or visualisor. But I had to get used to it, one and a half years ago when I… Read More

De auteur in een fictieve aflevering van zomergasten, met op de achtergrond een still uit de film over de Bijenkorf van Dudok, spiegelend in het water rond de caravan

Various

A Summer Guest in October

Every year in July and August there’s a show, made by VPRO on Dutch television, called Zomergasten (Summer Guests). From eight till eleven PM one guest shows and talks about his favorite television clips. The guests can be anyone, from the prime minister or celebrities from the world of entertainment to scientists or designers who are largely unknown outside their own field of expertise. Whining about the program is a kind of national sport. The skills of the host, the selection of guests and the fragments they choose, the occasions in which everyone is enthousiastic are very rare. One would… Read More

Selection of photographs with the theme of Rotterdam on the edges of the night

Various

Rotterdam: the Edges of the Night – new expo in the Lijnbaan gallery

Since this week there’s a new exhbition of photographs from my Rotterdam collection in my Lijnbaan gallery. This didn’t happen at the expense of the permanent collection, which is still there like it has been in the last two years on the front facade of 3Develop’s premises in one of the residential building in the Lijnbaan national heritage area. Blue Hours Unlike the permanent collection, which gives an comprehensive overview of my work, I have picked a more defined theme this time: Rotterdam on the Edges of the Night. Photos taken in the so-called blue hour before sunrise and after… Read More

Fotograaf Frans Blok in actie op een zonnige herfstdag in het Groene Hart bij Woerden

Frans Blok, 3d artist, designer and photographer

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