Meet the staff - Lars

It's been real silent here these last months, but I'm glad to say our blog is coming back to life again. You may already have seen our latest wallpaper collection, published last week. In addition to this, you can expect to see a lot of cool stuff headed this way!

To get things rolling properly, I'm kicking off a series we'll be running in the blog, introducing the various staff members at Crestock, telling you about themselves and what they do at the company, in their own words. Basically anything they think the varied group of people reading this blog might be interested by.

First off: Myself!

So then, some basics first. My full name is Lars Hasvoll Bakke and at 21 years of age, I'm the youngest staff member at Crestock. I've been with the company for close to 2 ½ year now, doing a fairly wide variety of work, from surveying customers and inspecting new submissions to customer service and various editorial writing. Right now, my two main responsibilities are running this blog and preparing our long belated forum for launch.

When we first took down the forum in February, we where expecting to get a brand new forum up and running within three to four weeks. The reason it's still down now, seven months later, is quite simply a temporary lack of programming resources.

To find skilled, reliable programmers with time to spare, our development team, just as our inspection team, had to expand beyond our native country (Norway), even beyond the continent, which means that Crestock now has employees in three continents, or four whenever our chief of inspections, Josh Hodge, goes home on vacation.

While our new programmers where brought up to speed on the inner workings of Crestock, we had to prioritize heavily how we used our current resources, and so, the forum was put aside as development work was focused on the very core of our business, taking a wide variety of steps to improve the website usability and increase sales.

During the summer, our development situation has improved, and so, I'm very relieved to say our new forum only has a few small fixes and some bug testing left, and we'll be ready to launch. The forum is going to be a rather simple mechanism, we've prioritized speed, simplicity and smooth operation over fancy functions and opulent design.

Contents-wise, we want this forum to be more than just discussions about Crestock inspection standards and other stuff strictly related to the company - we want it to become a go-to place for solid, focused discussions and advice on shooting and designing with microstock imagery.

To help out with this, we've enrolled a number of skilled and respected microstock artists who have agreed to form a "Pro panel", which will be discussing and dispensing advice on the various facets of microstock production. In addition, we've got plans for some really cool monthly competitions which will be run in the forum, which I'm confident will attract your attention.

As for my other main responsibility, the blog, I was officially put in charge of it during the summer, after having written a number of popular posts for the blog. If you follow this blog, you've probably noticed these, such as the three articles about Soviet, US and German propaganda posters from the 20^th Century. The latter article in particular may have suffered under my love of using too many words rather than too few, resulting in a 5000 word behemoth, twice the size of the previous two.

Since I'm also ridiculously meticulous in my writing, both with regards to facts and wording, these posts become big projects for me. Huge amounts of time went into researching them and getting it all typed out properly.

Nevertheless, amongst all the self-inflicted pain I derive from trying to be so damned accurate, I love writing this stuff. For one thing, I do enjoy writing in itself, moreover, these posters combine two subjects I love, modern history and a particularly cool branch of graphic design.

History, as it turned out, was such a big interest of mine that I wound up leaving my hometown (and the hometown of Crestock), Bodø, moving south to Trondheim, where I've been studying history at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for the past year.

Since I'm distinctly omnivorous in my interests, a good thing about the whole history study is that it's pretty much useless on it's own, unless you draw on other sciences and disciplines, you won't get anywhere. So as a history student, I can take an historic perspective on all sorts of interesting stuff, economy, beer, philosophy, music, and as I hope I've demonstrated to you, graphic design.

That said, I won't make any claim to my propaganda articles being of academic quality, as a history student, I'm just starting out, and my knowledge of graphic design is strictly that of a dilettante. Just as well really - academic writing tends to be, well, academic!

So then, that's an introduction to myself and what I do. Since I'm heavily involved with this blog, you'll probably get to know me better eventually. Since we'd also love to get to know our readers (you!) better, and hear your suggestions for the blog, fire away in the commentary field beneath. That's all for now, I've got to get back to writing a paper on the genocide in Rwanda.

-Lars