I worked with academic institutions, businesses and inspiring individuals all over the world, designing for all kinds of purposes and with all kinds of means.
& their words
Maarten Ottens combines his refined sense of design with a very important aspect of the kind of work he does: he listens well. He is able to develop concepts on the basis of what we do as businesses or individuals while strongly respecting our identities. You can appreciate this when you visit all the websites that he has recently created for a variety of people.
Our company experienced a huge response to our website and other printed materials. Most responses from these come along with compliments. The logo and colors relay to people the type of food we do. Our business cards produce an instant facial expression that tells us they like it.
Don’t hesitate. Hire him.
I am extremely proud of the website Maarten Ottens designed for our museum. He developed a website which beautifully and deftly captures the modern aesthetic of our museum while highlighting the intricacy of our ancient artifacts. The website is often the way in which visitors first encounter our museum, and Maarten has designed a site that is visually arresting, inviting, and easy to navigate. I also asked him to design temporary signage for our museum; he once again created clean, crisp designs which succinctly convey practical information, while maintaining a sense of delight and whimsy through his choice of colors.
Maarten Ottens is superb to work with because of his ability to quickly identify the most critical elements of a project and then translate them into stunning design. He always listened carefully to our requirements, offered different options for some of our challenging design needs, and responded quickly to our numerous requests and changes. Maarten is also deeply committed to patiently and painstakingly ensuring that every detail of a project is completed to an extremely high standard. Working with him was a pleasure, and in fact we continue to work together on an expansion of our current website.
Prerna Singh - Assistant Professor at the Department of Government at Harvard University
I had not quite appreciated the design of websites as an art form until I was introduced to the work of mmott. That is probably because I had not seen a collection such exquisite websites, enticing one in and capturing a world - a restaurant or the work of an artist or journalist - with precision but also warmth. I worked with mmott to design the website of the Harvard-MIT-Brown South Asia Seminar, which I co-direct with Professors Ashutosh Varshney, Patrick Heller and Vipin Narang, as well as my own professional website. For both projects, Maarten worked hard to elicit what we had in mind, then meticulously prepared memos based on our discussion and after further consultations, came up with a few designs, which we then provided our feedback on and Maarten modified accordingly. At no point did this process of iterative discussion seem tedious. This is because Maarten seemed to have the uncanny knack of quickly translating my frequently inchoate remarks into the perfect color, font or design. He seemed to know exactly what I was looking for even when I didn't! The result of this unexpectedly quick and delightful process are websites that are inviting, comprehensive in the information that they provide, easy to navigate but perhaps most importantly, capture the "personality" and "vibe" of the seminar and of my research.