Meet Jan AKA Honza AKA José, Oddball from the Wax Crayons Department and Design Team Leader

Hello there! Meet Jan (‘Honza’ among friends). From an early age, he played, studied and worked with computers. It was the university that introduced him to the realm of User Experience. He joined a guild of designers in Lundegaard more than four years ago.

Since then he has helped customers create more user-friendly web apps or pages.

This is how I draw

Why did you join Lundegaard, and what has kept you here?

The start is a rather long story that doesn't relate much to Lundegaard, but it has a happy ending that has me still working here after four years. I’ll share the story in this interview.

It all started at my previous job with my colleague from the developer's team. We had told each other that we were considering new job offers. After this "coming-out", we started to exchange contacts of companies that had matured design and react teams. This was how I came by Lundegaard and we planned to move our collaboration to this company.

It was the manager and colleagues at Lundegaard that gave me the confidence that it could be the right company to join. I have to honestly say that as soon as the first project I had confirmed that it was the right choice to join Lundegaard.

What is your favourite part about working for Lundegaard?

That is an easy peasy lemon squeezy question. Meeting a lot of our customers or prospects and having an opportunity to discuss with them their visions and plans really satisfies me. All this allows me to get to know many people across different industries and always learn something new about their opportunities to grow or challenges.

Last but not least it is the daily work I deliver to our customers. Seeing their joy after a few iterations of our prototypes and for them being able to go through it and see it alive.

What is your role at Lundegaard?

I am the one who holds and distributes the boxes of wax crayons at the beginning of the shift every morning. I am the design team leader and UX designer. Helping colleagues and our customers boost up the UX of their digital channels.

#LivinLaVidaLunde

How do you define success in life?

The answer is pretty individual, but for me, it is about having a loving family and friends around you. Being satisfied with my daily job routine and having colleagues with the same sense of humour.

How do you balance your career at Lundegaard and friends & family?

This could be a long work-life question. Sometimes I have a feeling I have solved it but then realize that I have completely lost my work-life balance.

But I guess you can win small battles, find friends at work, and go out for lunch with a friend working close to you. It is a squash game (or whatever sport you like) just before you go to work. You can do something for yourself, and you can spend time with someone you like.

Do you have any hobbies, go-to weekend activities, or long-term passion projects you’re working on?

A few years ago, for fun I took with me an old analogue camera for my holidays instead of a digital one; I have to admit I have totally fallen in love with analogue photography and its development process.

Since then, you can see me often with an analogue camera in my hand. What still amazes me is that I am using cameras older than me, and they are still working very well. Roaming around the Old Town of Prague equipped with one, can still, after all these years, bring joy and a source of new inspiration.

I have still not mentioned a word about films and developing them. I really enjoy my experiments with film soups when you intentionally harm film to add uncontrolled and unexpected layers of colours.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof on double exposure

What are your three most overused words/phrases?

1. It depends.
2. Interesting hypothesis.
3. Lorem Ipsum

If you could witness any historical event, what would you want to see?

Haha, this gonna be the only answer without jokes, I guess. As a young Czech, I would like to have witnessed the Velvet revolution. All pictures and videos I have seen always have strong national and independence emotions. This event strongly influenced our country during my childhood, and unfortunately, it is not much discussed in school.

Do you have an office nickname? What is it?

Yes, I do. It is José (Mourinho; former Portuguese soccer player, and currently head coach of the Serie A club Roma). It’s because we have similar family names. It should be noted that this is the only thing I have in common with the soccer player.

Get in touch with Honza and his team at Lundegaard

You can call of course, whenever you want; however, meeting in person is irreplaceable. In case you consider dropping by Prague sometime, do not hesitate to knock on the door of the “aquarium” - it’s how the design team calls the creative glass room they work in - and ask for a great cup of coffee as Honza is also a big coffee lover.