For Creative students school is always a bit weird, you want to work hard to earn high grades and get your diploma but if that is all you’ve got at the end of the course, you are nowhere in the job market. What really matters is your portfolio, all the work you created in and outside of school during your course, to show your skills and growth.
At Communication and Multimedia Design Maastricht we are aware of this fact and students are encouraged to save their work and build a portfolio, the problem I see in the tooncultuur of CMD Maastricht is not the existence of good work but the visibility of it.
What is Tooncultuur?
In Dutch design education, we often talk about tooncultuur. It means “show culture” the habit of regularly presenting your work to classmates, teachers, and the outside world. At its best, tooncultuur creates an open environment where students learn from each other’s process.
At CMD Tooncultuur shines in sharing your work with peers and holding an exposition after a minor or semester for peers and family. After a minor is completed and the next one starts and the projects disappear into the archives along side the rest. When I share my work to others I often only share the latest one because recency bias makes me believe it is my only good project I ever did.
The challenge with our current aproach
The problem is that when we present ourselves to potential employers, we are judged entirely on our work and how it meets their expectations. And in reality school projects and professional projects will always have a quality gap.
Highlighting and celebrating exceptional student work as institutions like CMD Amsterdam already do gives those projects a longer life. It allows students to point to a past project with pride, backed by recognition from their peers and teachers. More importantly, it gives current and future students clear examples of what “great” can look like.
That’s where my project comes in: an app designed to give a proper spotlight to the best work our course produces. Work that inspires, sets the bar, and shows every CMD student what’s possible.
Introducing Apolloview
Apolloview is the project I will be working on during the first semester of the 2025-2026 school year. Taken from the Greek god Apollo, patron of the arts, light, and beauty, a symbol of creative expression and the pursuit of excellence., which in this case refers to the work students at CMD Maastricht create.
During this semester I will build an app that allows multimedia of all sorts to be displayed in an AR environment. With this I will create a book that features all my projects I have worked on during my education. The goal of this project is to persuade the institution to create a yearly book showing the best projects CMD has to offer.
Creativity is contagious, pass it on. - Albert Einstein