Wimer never stopped playing with Lego, he replaced colorful blocks with creative code. It's more socially acceptable that way.
He grew up in the City of 100 Names, at this point of time called Ljouwert, the capital of Friesland. He is currently living and working in Amsterdam.
Visit Monokai for an overview of personal projects.
Timeline so far
- 1981 Born
- 1986 Ate a cigarette
- 1992 Learned to make the computer beep in GW-Basic
- 1993 Experimented in Q-Basic to create visuals, games, tools
- 1994 Created and sold a drawing program to a software disk magazine
- 1999 Studied AI in Groningen before it was cool, got a MSc degree 8 years later, enjoyed freedom
- 2001 One year art school stint, where I enjoyed learning about developing analog photos, but otherwise produced "art" that I make sure will be locked forever or burned
- 2002 Made a movie with some friends and created a supporting Flash Experience, decided to never pursue an acting career
- 2005 Built Monoslideshow, a customizable, commercial Flash slideshow, later used by Tumblr for a few years
- 2006 Created the company Monokai as a creative outlet for personal projects
- 2006 Created the Monokai color scheme, used and remixed all over the world, Sublime Text adopted it as its default theme
- 2007 Started a digital design company called Booreiland with a few friends, grew to 10 people over time
- 2008 Created the Vormator concept with Zeptonn, where illustrators had to create an artwork using only a specific set of shapes, and published a book about it
- 2009 Converted Monoslideshow from Flash to JavaScript + WebGL
- 2010 Co-organized Dot Mov with friends, an experimental project to produce a movie in a week from start to finish, sharpened my Boom Operator qualities
- 2011 Made a web app to generate future tweets based on your Twitter DNA, went viral to 2 tweets per second
- 2012 Resided in Berlin for 6 weeks to produce a music album, returned home with nice memories and no music album
- 2015 On the ferry back to home, I read about the Maagdenhuis student protests and decided to play a photo journalist, the photos are now part of the Amsterdam city archive.
- 2016 Created the first commercial syntax highlighting theme called Monokai Pro, used by millions of people
- 2019 Built a custom web platform to automatically design logos
- 2021 Dove head-first into generative art, making as much visual impact with as little code as possible, one piece got awarded as Tender Icon
- 2022 Merged our company with two other companies into Clarify, working as Tech / AI Director
- 2023 Married Else on a beautiful day in Jorwert, a small village somewhere in Friesland