trendmatter.com | mac oosthuizen

Recently I had to get my car MOT’ed and pay it’s road tax which meant having to check it in at a mechanics and basically wait to hear what they can find at fault with it. (Yeh, I know I’m cynical). While I waited I spent a quiet morning in a small park just sitting […]

Coming from a student background and being thrust into your first real job in a collaborative design office is kind of like being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool, but then tossed a life jacket by your work colleagues and reeled back in. The contrast between the solo work life of a […]

I always suspected that my amazing good looks and expensively styled hair is the reason behind my cutting edge design style. I work very hard to maintain my image and fantastic figure, which is the same for my work, which I’ve refined over years of experience. I must admit, it’s hard for me to get […]

Coroflot recently held is 6th Annual Design Salary Report and there were some pretty interesting results. Some things came as a surprise while others where pretty much expected. Although mainly based on North American statistics, a lot of it probably rings true for the rest of the world especially to the new global conscious and […]

Skills. Designers have a lot of them. Designers need a lot of them. Some of us are swept up in our endeavor to be better designers and deliberately choose to improve our sketching, learn some new piece of software, read up on that latest ‘design trend’. However, I put it to you that there is […]

Living in Holland is strange. Its liberal attitudes towards soft drugs are amusing. Its insane transport layout of cycle-lanes and roads are confusing. Their willingness to speak whichever language you happen to speaking (be that English, French, German or Belgian) is bemusing. In its essence living in Holland is just like living in the […]

Africa fades in and out of the limelight pretty regularly. Reporters report on the awful deaths and killings in the Middle East but reports on the thousands dying from AIDs, war and famine every week are fading and distant. Africa is a thorn in the western worlds side, a technicality that is only of importance […]

Since I work above one of the biggest shopping malls in Hong Kong it is inevitable that I need to walk through it every morning, lunchtime and evening. Most of the shopping done is fashion related with about 90% of the shops catering to the fashion/brand aware. One casual lunchtime I walked past a shop […]

“What does it do?” she said, lifting her eyes off the thick wad of dog-eared sketches in front of her.
“Umm, well you put the toy in here and it shoots it out of it……I tried to get the feeling of the environment the toy is set in accurate enough so that it looks nice and […]

A new article posted on Core77 has challenged the creation of artifacts in design, instead arguing that designing an experience is of top importance, with everything simply aiding the interaction process that someone has with that experience. Peter Merholz talks about the success of Kodak, Apple and TiVo as prime examples of a company […]

Based on Philip K. Dick’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Blade Runner takes us into a world where humans have created sentient beings almost identical to humans. The film, just like the book, asks the age old question of what it is to be human. If our own emotional responses and […]

Channel Five in the UK is currently having a special on China, showing a range of documentaries and films about the nation and its history. One such program is Paul Merton In China. For those who aren’t familiar with Mr Merton, you can catch him on Have I Got News For You in the UK […]

Being quite a fan of graffiti and street art and it’s diversity and impact on a city, it was hard for me to arrive in Hong Kong and to see almost no graffiti on the walls and buildings around the city.
Maybe the laws on graffiti are especially strict or the people of this great […]

Recently I had the opportunity to visit a injection mould production factory located on the ourskirts of the up and coming “Whatever Hong Kong can do, we can do better” city, Shenzhen. Located just over the border into China’s Guangdong Province. A simple 30 minute train ride from Kowloon to the edge of Hong Kong […]

“Can you carry this? I want to take you with me to a meeting with one of our vendors” she said as she handed me the large, rough working model of a current design idea. Still clutching the work I thought I was going to be presenting my boss for final approval I realized this […]