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Background Story

Hello, I’m Richard van Kat! or Richard Koay if you know me from a work setting. As a kid, I was always that quiet short spectacle kid who sit in front row, very good in math and science, and play with grass during sport class. You guessed right that I was not in a big group of friends, but I do appreciate all my small niche interest friends.

During my childhood, I do feel fortunate to find friends that share similar interests. I remembered I was very into Disney Atlantis, and I found a friend that learn the Atlantis alphabets with me. I was very into fictional language every since, and Atlantis is the one of the first fantasy movies that sparks my interest into worldbuildings, together with Disney’s Treasure Planet, Lilo & Stitch; Movies such as Fifth Element, Star Wars Prequel, Matrix Trilogy do deepened my interest; Console games Final Fantasy 7, 8, 10 and 12, Kingdom Hearts, Tales series, The World Ends with You are the main inspirations to get me into game fantasy worldbuildings and character designs. I love Tetsuya Nomura & Hyung-tae Kim‘s character designs.

When I was a teen, I came upon the Devil Wears Prada movie and Project Runway series. I started to find fashion very intriguing, after learning the costume designer for Fifth Element is by a famous fashion designer, Jean Paul Gaultier. I started to explore other fashion designer’s work, like Vivienne Westwood, Gareth Pugh, and Alexander McQueen. I realised I wanted to create a name for myself with an unique recognisable style, at that time.

For someone who has a lot of his school art assignments secretly done by his mum, taking the leap to go into a design school is a big leap for me, mentally. I do had a good art teacher during my primary school that trust in me, and I turned from a kid that cried a lot during art classes, into a kid that love crayon colour combination and still dislike watercolours. My mum’s hard work to finished my art assignments do inspired me to learn more about art, and creating by myself.

And I got into a Graphic Design university! I was worried about other design courses, and chose the safest option I thought at that time. Meeting all new people that is into design, is an eye-opening exciting experience for me. Soon, I finally learnt the anime movie poster that I found in a Japanese magazine as a kid, is actually Howl’s Moving Castle. I have never heard of Ghibli beforehand (Do not ask me how I live my whole 20 years without knowing them), and Ghibli slowly became one of my core inspirations.

Along the way, I got into typography, website coding, branding, marketing and my final year project is a fictional game company. Graduated, not sure how to get work in a game company, and I was hired as a mural artist and website developer in a start-up company, a very weird combo of job tasks, and I really appreciate the experience, the goods and the bads. And my colleague introduced me to Animal Crossing!

Fast forward to now, I have my tiny online journal, and thank you for walking the journey with me!