Willem Van Lancker

Last updated
Willem Van Lancker
Born
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Moses Brown School, Rhode Island School of Design
Occupation(s)Head of Incubations at Thrive Capital, Former Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Oyster
Website www.willemvanlancker.com

Willem Van Lancker is an American entrepreneur and product designer, who is best known for being the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of ebooks company Oyster. [1] [2] [3] He is currently the Head of Incubations at Thrive Capital, a technology investment firm based in New York City. [4]

Contents

Biography

Willem Van Lancker was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the private high school Moses Brown School, where he was named the 2016 Outstanding Young Alumnus. [5] [6] Van Lancker received a BFA degree in Graphic Design in 2011 from Rhode Island School of Design. [7] He briefly attended Harvard Business School for graduate courses but did not complete his degree. [8] It was at Harvard Business School where he met Eric Stromberg, one of the future co-founders of Oyster. [8]

He began his career at Adidas in 2008 as an intern. [1] Van Lancker later interned at Apple in 2009 where he helped create Apple's emoji. [9] From 2010 until 2012, Van Lancker was a user experience designer for Google Maps where he worked on Google Maps for iOS and "The New Google Maps." [10] [8] [11] Oyster was founded in 2012 by Van Lancker, Eric Stromberg and Andrew Brown. [2] After Oyster was acquired by Google in 2015, Van Lancker and the rest of the staff moved to Google. [12]

Van Lancker was named one of Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 in 2015. [1] [13]

On April 6, 2022, Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee announced that Rhode Island's new license plate was designed by Van Lancker after the state held an open call for entries for a new design. The design features 5 waves. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brown University</span> Private university in Rhode Island, U.S

Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. It is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. One of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution, it was the first U.S. college to codify that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of the religious affiliation of students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhode Island School of Design</span> Art and design college in Rhode Island, US

The Rhode Island School of Design is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the accessibility of design education to women. Today, RISD offers bachelor's and master's degree programs across 19 majors and enrolls approximately 2,000 undergraduate and 500 graduate students. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum—which houses the school's art and design collections—is one of the largest college art museums in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moses Brown School</span> Private school in Providence, Rhode Island, United States

Moses Brown School is an independent, Quaker, college preparatory school located in Providence, Rhode Island, offering pre-kindergarten through secondary school classes. It was founded in 1784 by Moses Brown, a Quaker abolitionist, and is one of the oldest preparatory schools in the country. The school motto is Verum Honorem, "True Honor", and the school song is "In the Shadow of the Elms", a reference to the large grove of elm bushes that still surrounds the school.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moses Brown</span> American abolitionist and industrialist

Moses Brown was an American abolitionist and industrialist from New England who funded the design and construction of some of the first factories for spinning machines during the American industrial revolution, including the Slater Mill which was the first modern factory in America.

<i>The College Hill Independent</i> Student newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island

The College Hill Independent is a weekly college newspaper published by students of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, the two colleges in the College Hill neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. With a circulation of about 2,000, it is the largest weekly newspaper in Southern New England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">College Hill, Providence, Rhode Island</span> Neighborhood of Providence in Rhode Island, United States

College Hill is a historic neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, and one of six neighborhoods comprising the city's East Side. It is roughly bounded by South and North Main Street to the west, Power Street to the south, Governor Street and Arlington Avenue to the east and Olney Street to the north. The neighborhood's primary commercial area extends along Thayer Street, a strip frequented by students in the Providence area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">East Side, Providence, Rhode Island</span> Collection of neighborhoods

The East Side is a collection of neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city of Providence, Rhode Island. It officially comprises the neighborhoods of Blackstone, Hope, Mount Hope, College Hill, Wayland, and Fox Point.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Maeda</span> American artist and computer scientist

John Maeda is a Vice President of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. He is an American technologist and designer whose work explores where business, design, and technology merge to make space for the "humanist technologist."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malcolm Grear</span> American graphic designer

Malcolm Grear was an American graphic designer whose work encompassed visual identity programs, print publications, environmental design, packaging, and website design. He is best known for his visual identity work and designed logos for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Veterans Administration, the Presbyterian Church USA, and Vanderbilt University. He was the CEO of Malcolm Grear Designers, a design studio in Providence, Rhode Island.

Apple Color Emoji is a color typeface used on Apple platforms such as iOS and macOS to display Emoji characters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oyster (company)</span> Commercial streaming service for digital e-books

Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Gebbia</span> American businessman

Joseph Gebbia Jr. is an American designer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of home rental company Airbnb. Gebbia is the 286th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $8.5 billion, mostly due to his ownership of 53 million shares of Airbnb. In 2022, Gebbia joined the board of Tesla Inc. and bought a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs basketball team.

Heidi Lee is a Couture Hat fashion designer who was born in Flushing, Queens, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George T. Downing</span> American restaurateur, abolitionist and activist (1819–1903)

George T. Downing was an abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights while building a successful career as a restaurateur in New York City; Newport, Rhode Island; and Washington, D.C. His father had been an oyster seller and caterer in Philadelphia and New York City, building a business that attracted wealthy white clients. From the 1830s until the end of slavery, Downing was active in the Underground Railroad, using his restaurant as a rest station for refugees on the move. He built a summer season business in Newport, and made it his home. For more than 10 years, he worked to integrate Rhode Island public schools. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Downing helped recruit African-American soldiers.

An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.tld.

iOS 12 2018 mobile operating system

iOS 12 is the twelfth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple. Aesthetically similar to its predecessor, iOS 11, it focuses more on performance than on new features, quality improvements and security updates. Announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 4, 2018, iOS 12 was released to the public on September 17, 2018. It was succeeded for the iPhone and iPod Touch by iOS 13 on September 19, 2019, and for the iPad by iPadOS 13 on September 24, 2019. Security updates for iOS 12 continued for four years after the releases of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 for devices unable to run the newer versions. The last update, 12.5.7, was released on January 23, 2023.

Adam Charlap Hyman is an American designer and artist. He is the co-founder and partner of Charlap Hyman & Herrero, an architecture and design firm based out of New York City and Los Angeles. His grandfather is pianist and composer Dick Hyman.

Angela Guzman is a Colombian-American graphic designer best known for designing the original set of Apple Emoji as a design intern at Apple.

The Pistol emoji (🔫) is an emoji defined by the Unicode Consortium as depicting a "handgun" or "revolver". It was historically displayed as a handgun on most computers ; as early as 2013, Microsoft chose to replace the glyph with a ray gun, and in 2016 Apple replaced their glyph with a water pistol. Since then, its rendering has been inconsistent across vendors. Microsoft changed its glyph back to an icon of a revolver during 2016 and 2017, before switching it to a (differently-styled) ray gun; in 2018, Google and Samsung changed their devices' rendering of the emoji to a water pistol, as well as the websites Facebook and Twitter. In 2024, Twitter chose to restore the glyph of a handgun, although instead of a revolver it used a semi-automatic M1911.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Willem Van Lancker, 27". Forbes. 2015. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  2. 1 2 Hamburger, Ellis (2014-11-05). "The future of books is on your phone, not your tablet". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  3. "Oyster Raises $3M From Founders Fund To Finally Create An Unlimited Subscription Service For Books". TechCrunch. 10 October 2012. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  4. "Thrive Capital". thrivecap.com. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  5. "MB Cupola fall 2014 / winter 2015: Design Thinking". Issuu. Moses Brown School. Fall 2014. p. 19. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  6. "MB Cupola: People (Fall 2016) by Moses Brown School - Issuu". issuu.com. Retrieved 2022-11-14.
  7. "Modi Among Top Tech Designers". Our RISD, Rhode Island School of Design. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  8. 1 2 3 D'Onfro, Jillian. "How e-book startup Oyster plans to be the 'Amazon lolol of the next 10 years'". Business Insider. Retrieved 2021-01-27. Oyster is the brainchild of Van Lancker, formerly a Google user experience designer and now chief product officer
  9. Coscarelli, Joe (2012-12-09). "The Proliferation of Emoji". New York Magazine. Archived from the original on 2012-12-12. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  10. Parfeni, Lucian (30 September 2011). "The Google Maps Pin Gets Modernized, Maps Sports a Fresh New Look (Screenshots)". softpedia. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  11. Rosen, Rebecca J. (2012-01-11). "How Do You Build an Interactive, Clear, and Detailed Map of the Whole World?". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-01-27. explains Willem Van Lancker and Jonah Jones, two user experience and visual designers on the Google Maps team
  12. "E-book service Oyster closes down as much of its staff heads to Google". GeekWire. 2015-09-22. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
  13. "Profile: Willem Van Lancker, Cofounder". Forbes. 2015.
  14. Farzan, Antonia (6 April 2022). "Here's what will replace the wave on Rhode Island's license plates". The Providence Journal. Retrieved 7 April 2022.