About

Bart Dykstra

Designing clarity for complex brand and technology experiences. Let's build yours!

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👋 Hi, I'm Bart Dykstra.

Head of Design | Creative Director | Design Director | Brand + Product as One System, AI-Native / Built a brand cited in 50 global companies’ published reports / Hands still on the tools: Figma, Cursor, motion, camera. Based in Valencia, Spain (CET), synchronized for PT & GST Time Zones.

I’m a creative director and design leader with 15+ years building brands, products, and visual systems for technology and cultural clients. My work combines brand invention with product clarity, executed with editorial sensibility and high craft. I create coherent identities across campaigns, digital experiences, editorial storytelling, and product surfaces, turning complexity into visual narratives that people actually remember.

At Datamaran I invented the brand from zero and scaled the design function from one to ten through Series A, B, and C ($33M, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital). I led hiring and creative direction, building a design culture grounded in ownership and craft. I still work hands-on with teams across product, marketing, engineering, and leadership, moving fast from rough concept to tested prototype and keeping the work measurable.

My path started close to the technology itself, at TomTom, on web content and UX testing for portable navigation, in the era before smartphone maps existed. From there my background spans editorial photography, documentary research at Magnum Photos, museum work at Huis Marseille, and communication agencies and creative collectives in Amsterdam.

Today I work across the full arc, from first principles and strategic direction to AI-native execution. Rebuilding production around AI-native tools freed up roughly three prototyping days per sprint across four pods, around 2,000 design and handover hours a year, with the craft bar held and the outcomes human. The result is AI-augmented design systems and executive storytelling frameworks for complex, mission-driven organizations.

Outside of design I play and record extremely loud electric guitars and extremely soft synthesizers. I’m also a humble dancer of Argentine tango.

I’m open to leading brand and product work for ambitious teams, in-house or with a studio. Let’s talk.

⸻ EVER-EVOLVE
⸻ TRANSFORM & ITERATE

Process is a loop, not a line.

Continuous discovery, continuous craft.

Discovery doesn’t stop when the build starts, and a brand doesn’t stop at the guidelines. I run design as a loop: discovery keeps testing, in user interviews and in market; delivery keeps shipping, product and campaign alike. It’s how Datamaran’s platform moved through five generations without a rebuild from zero, and how one campaign metaphor held for four years and two films.

Weekly user touchpoints on the product side; market and category signals on the brand side. Rejecting the green-sector clichés for Datamaran’s identity was a sensing decision about a crowded category. The brand from zero →

Opportunities mapped before pixels; the metaphor chosen before the film. Framing decides what gets built and what gets shot. The Metaphor Makes the Decisions →

Hands on the tools: Figma, Cursor, motion, camera. Prototypes over decks, boards over briefs. The vibe coding process →

Product delivered across five scrum teams in parallel; two campaign films launched on the same metaphor. The design system held in flight. Leadership and governance →

Shipped work feeds the next cycle. Five platform generations on the product side; a brand that held from seed to $33M Series C on the other. Instrumenting the loop is what freed those three prototyping days per sprint. Instruments, not deliverables →

05 feeds 01. The loop has no exit phase.

Selected projects across earlier 2005, 2012, 2025 archive:

TomTom | NavTech | 2005-2006

LuxperienceLabs | Superyacht tech integrator | 2012

Datamaran Ltd. | B2B SaaS Risk & Governance Intelligence | 2014-2026

LET'S BUILD WHAT'S NEXT

Collaborate on forward-thinking work shaped by branding, data, craft and technology.

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