A new look

I created my first editing website back in 2009 with html code. Someone told me, in 2020, that it looked very 1990s. Here’s what the home page looked like:

When I began to edit fulltime, the website was less a way to be found by potential clients than a way to show clients who already know about me who I am and the kind of work I do. I had the great good fortune to have interned at the University of Washington Press for a year, back in 2002-2003, and then to work freelance for them, exclusively but part-time, while I worked on my (incomplete) PhD, until 2007. That work was intense and satisfying and it gave me a great list of projects that became the foundation of my website.

When 2021 came around, almost 20 years after I began that first editorial internship, I was ready for a new editorial direction, and a new website.

The Heaths of Balloërveld

I’m an artist as well as an editor. I wanted my new website to be colourful and appealing, as well as simple, but I could not come up with an image of how it should look. I liked my business name, a rather whimsical translation of my (Dutch) last name, Hietkamp, but how to create a visual connection between the idea of fields of heather and my editing business?

The answer: the heaths of the Netherlands! I did not know the country of my parents had heaths, full of flowering heather. I contacted my cousins living there, to see if anyone might have good photographs, and Nelleke van Vliet sent me a gorgeous selection of the heaths of Balloërveld. Once I saw these, I was inspired to create a site that would provide visitors with a visual feast while reading about my services–a website portrait, if you like, of me, artist and editor.

Welcome to my new site!