Marcos Weskamp

Photograph courtesy of Marcos Weskamp

"The web had become this horrible mess of chrome and noise," says Marcos Weskamp, the chief designer of Flipboard. Argentinian by birth and trained in Japan, the news junkie has turned iPad owners' tangle of RSS feeds, Twitter streams, Flickr pics, and news sites into a one-stop shop with a clean, intuitive UI. "It's going to be tough" to tackle the data-deluge problem, he says, "but surely it will be a lot of fun."

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Marcos Weskamp

Marcos Weskamp's Posterous site

"Information overload was taking a toll on me and it was not fun. I knew I had to find a way to solve that problem."

Q: Where do you go for inspiration?

A: I mostly find inspiration whenever I'm not surrounded with technology. It's hard to do these days, but the best way for me to find a breather is just trying to find some space where I can look away from the work I have on my desk now, and come back to after a few days off the grid. I’ll pull up NASA’s map of earth’s city lights, zoom in on the black region around the Rockies, and say, ‘Let’s go there.’ I generally like to pack the car with gear and head out in a general direction, without really knowing where I'm going. In the middle of a start-up, it’s a little scary to go totally off the grid. Right now I'm writing these lines from the Mojave Desert; we found a really nice spot surrounded by Joshua trees, overlooking a small valley. It's beautiful up here. We might try to find a good hike today.

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Head of Design at Flipboard Inc. | San Francisco Bay Area

Summary:

Born in Rosario, Argentina 1977. In 1998 while pursuing undergraduate studies in Architecture, Fine Arts and Graphic Design in Argentina I received a scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education to continue my studies in Japan. Since graduating in graphic design in 2001, I have worked as graphic designer, interface developer and art director for companies such as DentsuFuse, Dentsu and Razorfish Tokyo. I am a self-taught web technologist who constantly pursues investigation in the fields of information visualization, online collaborative work environments and mobile media. In 2004 I received an award of distinction in the Net Vision category at Ars Electronica 2004 for my work newsmap.

Specialties:

Graphic Design, Information Design, User Interface Design, Information Visualization, Software engineering.

Connections:

203+

Positions:

Head of Design at Flipboard Inc.