minimaltwist

• My name is Alex Bendiken. +
  I'm a 25-year-old designy kind of guy living in sunny Spain…
  I don't really look like that kid on the left. My face is much less round and far more mature. Although, I do have blonde hair. And in case you were wondering, no, I'm not Spanish.
• I'm a designer & front-end developer. +

  I believe in simple and functional design… My super power is intuitively understanding the objectives and embracing the constraints of any project. Using that power I come up with a solution that feels so simple you're left wondering why you didn't think of it yourself.

  I can whip up world-classstandards-compliant, gracefully degrading, "look-ma, no tables", [insert more jargon here] kind of HTML/CSS and Javascript with my hands tied behind my back, while hanging upside down from a tree… It would be impossible for me to be a "web designer""web designer", or interaction designer, or user experience designer, or any other kind of designer that designs for the web, if I didn't.

  I've also helped develop big, small and tiny Ruby and PHP web apps that do a variety of things… I use Ruby on Rails for most development, Sinatra for smaller endeavors, and Wordpress for any bloggy kind of things.

• I'm part of Makalu Interactive. +

  We're a small team working from an oceanfront office in beautiful Marbella, Spain. We design, develop and operate engaging products for some of the world’s most iconic brands — like Google, Virgin America & O'Reilly… Check out the Makalu website for more information.

• I have a two-nil streak in doing spec work. +
  I know, I know, spec work is bad. And I took part in it not just once, but twice—and won both times. Get me some soap, I feel dirty.

  1. All the way back in 2005 I won Wil Shipley's blog redesign contest and got myself an iPod Shuffle… Later I had the chance to do some more design work for him, but unfortunately I was too busy from the aftermath from the next win.
  2. Half a year later I entered the Slashdot redesign contest and won that too. This time I got myself a MacBook Pro and lots of publicity…
     I decided to participate in the contest (and hence came up with the design) two days before the deadline, and only because I didn't care much for any of the other entries.
• I run a one-man Italian kitchen. +

  Having gotten together with the only Italian girl who doesn't cook, I took it upon myself to master all the traditional Italian dishes and be the chef in the house.

  Pizza and risotto are my specialties, and next I'll need to figure out how to make proper ice-cream.

• P90X and salsa keep me in shape. +

  Too bad thinking doesn't burn calories.

  I'm halfway through the three-month P90X program which is supposed to make me look like The Incredible Hulk. Not that it ever will.

  To balance it out I'm also taking salsa classes. Good news is that I've already got my hands and feet moving in sync—bad news is that I have absolutely no sense of rhythm.

• Feel free to get in touch.