About – Pieter Staaks

I'm Pieter Staaks, this is my story.

I was born on the 26th of March 1996 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. From the very start, I’ve taken a different approach to life. Whether it was being born six weeks too early or crawling backwards. From a young age, I discovered my love for photography, mostly with good old disposable film cameras.

However, my creative touch wasn’t all that welcome, they thought it would’ve been better if I waited a little longer with moving up the next class. This never actually happened in the end, I’m thankful for that since I’ve always stayed playful. Nobody should decide that a six-year-old is considered too playful or that eyes on a bird should be round and not upside-down triangles with dots in them. I just kept playing games such as Pokémon on my Gameboy Color/Advance. Slowly but surely the digitalization happened to take place, talking about Windows XP systems. Already, it captured my imagination for what the future holds. On the computer at home, I was playing games or started to learn more about mythology, which I still love. For this reason, I still got all the old computer games like Age of Empires. If you were talking about movies, I loved Kiki’s Delivery Service by Ghibli and other animation movies. It took a while for me to appreciate humans in movies, sorry humans.

In the end, it worked out for me since I can put my creativity to work. I’ve graduated at multiple schools: Broeckland College (Business & Administration), Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht (Desktop Publishing), Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht (Interactive Design) and I am currently studying at Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (Communication Multimedia Design, Content Design).

All things well and swell, I’ve discovered early on the pain that life can bring. With taking care of my paralyzed grandmother and in 2001 my father’s health went on the decline. His battle ended in December 2020. I’m forever grateful for every moment I’ve spent with you and all the things you’ve taught me.

In my further discovery of the world, I’ve been reading myself into political theory and philosophy, where my position has always been on the classical liberal and libertarian side and most likely will not change. I’m a big advocate for personal and financial freedom for all. I like to see myself as a freedom of speech extremist. Freedom of speech is necessary for creatives to remove censors in their work.
Some heroes of mine are J.R.R. Tolkien, Salvador Dali, Vincent van Gogh, Dieter Rams, Hayao Miyazaki, Elon Musk and Aristotle.