According to Leen, the most essential property of a design is its visual attractiveness, its beauty. When you look at a design for the very first time, you should be overwhelmed just by what you are seeing, without any additional knowledge. Your first response should simply be: this looks awesome!

For Leen, the first impression of a design is strongly linked to its size (bigger = better) and to the use of pretty colors. But to keep you hooked to a design after the first impression, there should be something more to it. This is where the delicate balance between structure and randomness comes into play. Your mind needs some degree of structure and regularity to hold on to, but it also needs some degree of randomness in order to keep it interested. Another way to achieve this is by playing with changing perspectives: more details or shapes become visible in the design when you move towards or away from it.

When looking at designs, Leen finds it important that the viewer is in control and not the designer: you should be able decide for yourself what part of the design you want look at, for how long, and from what distance and angle. When creating animated graphic designs, the designer strongly directs the time and focus that is available to the viewer. To prevent this from happening in his designs, Leen decided to create non-animated graphics only.

To simultaneously allow for an unlimited design size and unlimited levels of detail, all of Leen's designs are created in a vector file format. He uses software programming to generate all the required vector file code. The programming also allows to introduce randomization in the designs. Thanks to this randomization, a specific design can never be created twice: every design is unique. You can make multiple versions of a design that all look very similar because they are created from the same basis, but when you look closer you will see that none are exactly the same.

Usually, Leen starts a new design with the idea that something pretty or peculiar can be created by adding a new functionality to his existing design possibilities. The features that he introduces to enable the basics of the idea are made as flexible as possible by functional generalization. This flexibility allows Leen to experiment with unforeseen design parameters, which can result in very surprising new designs.

Although all designs are created as vector files, they are presented as raster images on this website. This is done because Leen likes to be involved in all the applications of his designs. If you are interested in using any of the designs and would like to have it in vector file format, feel free to contact Leen!

There are of course a myriad of possible applications for the designs by Leen, such as wall decorations, greeting cards, clothing, and utilities. Some of them are an especially good match with his design philosophy and work method.

The possibility to make many very similar yet different versions of a single design, makes it possible to create all kinds of printed matter where each copy is unique. They can even be personalized based on information on the receivers; for example, names or addresses can be integrated in the design.

The combination of practically unlimited design sizes and levels of detail enable another great application: to decorate an entire wall with a single non-repetitive design, while maintaining a sharp image at all times. Nowadays, several companies are offering to print a customer-supplied image on a set of wallpaper rolls, that together can cover an entire wall! Another awesome options is to print the designs on curtains.