Different worlds. Same muscle.

Bart Bongers

Setting the scene

We met at the Oude Telefoon Centrale in Strijp-S—a place where, back in the Philips days, operators literally connected people. Fittingly, that’s what we did too. Once a hub for communication, now hosting another kind of conversation.

It was a quiet Friday afternoon. The autumn sun sat low, pouring through tall industrial windows. People were closing their laptops, easing into the weekend. The light, the history, and the timing made it the perfect backdrop for a reflective chat about design and life.

What he does

Bart designs for two completely different worlds.

By day, he creates large-scale plastic storage boxes. Objects millions of people use but rarely notice. By night, he designs bespoke race-car liveries, full of color, motion, and emotion.

He once dreamed of becoming a car designer but realized he wasn't the type to spend weeks sketching headlight variations. Balancing this expensive work with more functional work in storage box design keeps him engaged and creatively sharp.

Even though storage boxes look simple, he explained, designing something genuinely new is incredibly challenging. The company has been refining these products for over 40 years, so every small innovation has to earn its place. User research, insight, and creativity all matter. It’s not about adding features for novelty; it’s about finding something worthy of production in a saturated category.

What we talked about

Designing liveries

Switching from plastic boxes to race cars is like flipping from spreadsheets to fireworks.

In livery design, Bart works with brand color, texture and shape to express emotion in brand and sponsor identity. Blending in the speed, acceleration and wrapping complex 3D surfaces in 2D graphics comes on top of all that.

It’s a field where everyone has an opinion. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard, ‘my wife doesn’t like the color,’” he joked. The craft is balancing feedback, brand expectations, and his own creative integrity. Over time, he’s building his distinctive visual style and eventually people will come to him for that.

His journey into livery design started years ago when he joined a Red Bull design competition "just for fun." To his surprise, he finished in the top five two years in a row. That's when he realized he was onto something and he's been creating race-car graphics ever since.

Wrapping 2D graphics around 3D forms

Translating flat graphics onto curved car bodies is anything but straightforward. Race cars almost never have flat surfaces. Bart spent hours thinking about how lines would flow across curves, where seams would meet, how 2D shapes would 3D motion.

When the professional wrappers installed his design, they complimented how precise and “wrap-friendly” it was. Everything lined up perfectly and it all comes together. “Extremely satisfying” he said smiling.

I recognized that feeling immediately. In my own work, there's something magical about seeing things work: snapping together parts fresh from the printer; holding the first injection-molded sample; watching code perform exactly as intended. This is the quiet joy of design. It's when thinking turns tangible.

It echoed my earlier conversation with Yvonne: behind everything that feels effortless, there’s usually a mess someone quietly mastered. The magic of design lies in making complexity look simple and the hard stuff invisible.

Connecting threads

It still amazes me how the same design principles stretch across such different worlds.

Bart goes hands-on with cardboard and tape to prototype storage boxes—the same materials he uses to unwrap curved car surfaces. He researches trends to discover what people want in home storage, then applies the same mindset to interpret fashion and graphic trends for his racing liveries.

Completely different products, worlds, and audiences—yet the same creative tools, the same problem-solving muscle.

Reflections

The universality of design

Our conversation reminded me how design connects everything. Whether it’s a mass-produced storage box or a one-off race-car livery, both demand empathy, iteration, and craft. The tools change, but the thinking doesn’t. People sometimes frown when I say I’ve designed both payment terminals and baby bottles. Worlds apart on the surface, but ~80% of the tools overlap. To outsiders, this is confusing. Design looks like magic.

Variety as a creative strategy

Bart’s path made me think about my own mix of projects—how working across contexts keeps creativity alive. Too much of anything dulls the edge. It’s not that we stop caring about detail; it’s that our creative brains crave challenge. When work becomes predictable, curiosity fades. It inspired me to mix in more diversity and run more site projects and experiments.

Emotion meets engineering

I loved seeing how Bart balances what he feels with what he knows—emotion and analysis, art and engineering. Good design often lives exactly on that line.

The satisfaction of seeing it work

There’s a joy in seeing something you made used in the wild. Bart once spotted one of his storage boxes filled with ice and beer at a student party. Not the intended use case, but still a proud moment. Once design leaves the studio, it finds its own life. You can’t design the experience. You can only design for it.

Shared simplicity

Behind everything that feels simple, someone quietly mastered chaos. It’s the invisible craft that makes the world look effortless.