Proof of Concept: A VR Interview with YONK on the Future of Design

As emerging technologies like virtual, augmented, and mixed reality continue to take hold, we’ve seen them increasingly impact creative industries in a number of ways. From character and environmental design for games to reimagining what animated films can be and beyond, artists are inventing new workflows and tapping into their creativity in new ways. Architects can step inside their designs and explore them at scale, and sculptors can experience the depth of a piece and understand how it might interact with a space through MR.

To celebrate the ways in which immersive media are changing the face of art and design, we’re launching Proof of Concept: a new episodic series where we sit down with creative professionals to talk shop and learn how VR and MR headsets can help everyone bring their imagination to life in ways that have never been possible—until now.

For our inaugural episode, we’re spotlighting YONK, a Netherlands-based 3D animation studio that uses Medium by Adobe to craft visually striking artwork, animations, and character designs.

Victoria Young, YONK Co-Founder : I was studying fine art sculpture in London, and while I was studying, I thought maybe I could go and see Europe a little bit. We had this opportunity to go and study in Europe, so I took the opportunity. I got placed in the Netherlands, specifically the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. And when I went there, I met Niels, and we actually fell in love. It’s kind of like a bit of a soppy, sweet story, but we did. We fell in love.

Niels was studying graphic design at the time. And when we graduated, we thought that we could maybe collaborate together. We got along really well and our creative input kind of aligned. We were just having a great time, so why not start a studio together? That could be an amazing thing.

We had this sort of battle, like, what will we do as a studio? Neils isn’t gonna become a fine artist, and I’m certainly not a graphic designer. How can we blend these two things together? And we came up with 3D—that making 3D assets was the way that we could use both of our skills and learn something new and exciting. But what we quickly realized was that 3D was very hard and very difficult. There was a huge learning curve, and we thought, “It’s gonna take way too long for us to learn this.” At that time, we were also working full-time jobs, so there really wasn’t that much time left to actually learn this new thing.

So we decided, “OK, instead of going into tutorials and doing it sort of the normal way, what if we search for solutions? For something else that could actually elevate our creativity and get us making 3D work way quicker than we would do with a keyboard and mouse?” And the thing that we came up with, that we researched and found, was VR. We instantly bought a Rift S to just try it out.

We started making a lot of work in Medium—like a huge amount of work. And really, that kinda was the birth of YONK. We wanted to blend these backgrounds and we had to try something new. So we smashed our names together and decided to build this studio. We were lucky enough that our unique style and the fact that we were using this VR software program meant that we got clients and the studio started to become more serious. And now, we’ve been YONKing around since 2019.

Niels van der Donk, YONK Co-Founder: We first started by just making work for the sake of making. We enjoyed the experimentation. And I think when people see you having fun and just creating, clients will naturally approach you and they’ll also want to have a piece of that fun.

Our first client was It’s Nice That, the creative blog. They asked us, “Can you design an identity for the next generation?” It was putting the spotlight on new creators in the scene. They literally asked us, “Can you just do what you do? Because we enjoy what you do, and we just wanna see more of it and see it being used in our advertising.” And I think that’s why most people that approach us: They just want us to be us and have fun with what we do. And I think the work expresses that by itself as well and everyone’s having fun again.

VY: We didn’t have that style at all when we first began. The style is very much a result of the process itself. With the sort of tangible textures and air, we have a lot of people saying that they feel like they can touch our work and mold it. That’s basically just because we use Medium—the fact that we can work with our hands, the fact that we’re using almost like a clay-like substance.

And that clay-like substance means that everything has imperfections. It has a human hand back into it, which is something you don’t often see in 3D art. People are very clean in 3D, but we were doing something that puts a little bit more of the human back into it. We just got better and better at it, and that’s how the style sort of developed.

VY: Yeah. I think that these things are starting to become like a replica of those processes that we learned, more and more. Like for instance, you saying that you made the cup in Medium. You know, there's that whole turntable in Medium where you’re actually doing sort of like a clay sculpture. It’s kind of just like these versions of physical-world things. It’s going more and more back to just doing stuff thatI knew how to do when I was doing physical sculpture.

Now, you put on a headset and you can do the same thing without the mess or without having to go to a firing studio. It’s very fun to have the opportunity to just hop in and say, “I’m going to be creative without anything holding me back.”

VY: Exactly.

NvdD: It’s like creating without consequences in essence, right? You can just create—you don’t have to worry about where you’re going with a project or running out of clay. Because you have control-Z in VR obviously, and that’s super important. But at the same time, I think because you don’t have to feel scared anymore about running out of things, so even though you have that control-Z, I think we’re making a conscious decision of not using it really.

We try to create and just let it be the way it is, so we also embrace it if there’s mistakes. I’m like Bob Ross right now—happy mistakes. Just leave them in there and actually make a conscious choice to not use control-Z to go back. That’s also very important for us.

VY: It’s kind of like you said with these limitless possibilities. We do try and put some limitations on it because that’s kind of where the creativity blossoms in some way as well. But it’s nice to have the option that, if it does go wrong, I can go back. You feel less apprehensive about things.

VY: My study at an art school, my pathway was sculpture—but in the sense of realizing space, realizing how to fill space, how to not fill space, how to examine space. So it wasn’t necessarily about building the sculptures. It was a lot about the room that you were in and understanding what you can put in it and what it says.

For me, what really helped in this sense when moving to VR and being a VR sculptor is that even though the space that I’m in is kind of endless, I still think about the fact that people are gonna see the work in a specific format. They’re gonna see it as in this space. Maybe they’re gonna see it in MR using Passthrough. Maybe they’ll see it in front of them, or maybe they’re just gonna see it as a 2D image.

So it’s kind of realizing where things will go and what their usage is—just evaluating space. That’s kind of what I feel like is coming into this work as well.

NvvD: For me, as a graphic designer, it’s not really necessarily about graphic design itself that relates to what we do nowadays. For me, it was more the kind of mindset at the specific art academy I went to, the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague. They really allowed us to not only be focused on traditional graphic design, like typography, silk-screening, that type of stuff. You can also do coding. You can also play around a little bit with 3D. Maybe you want to present your work in a performative type of way. So that mindset really helped me to get to where we are now, and I think Vikki naturally already has this mindset herself.

For us, it was just like, “OK. I have these skills. But is there a way that I can use different tools to enhance what I already know? Or maybe I can put myself in a weird situation where I don’t know what these tools are, but because of the technical background that I have, maybe I can benefit from that.”

VY: VR has kind of unlocked a freedom from the lack of space and maybe the lack of time—we were able to do this in a moment where we didn’t have a huge studio or an endless about of money to buy supplies. But in terms of pushing our creativity, I feel like we thought about the 3D process in a different way.

For instance, we’re making a game where we’re putting it in advertising, we’re putting it in people’s spaces. And I think it’s quite fun because a lot of people don’t realize it’s VR sculpted until afterwards. I think it’s quite nice that there is the process there, and it’s becoming more and more mainstream now as well. It’s kind of pushing us also to take this process and our creativity, our characters, and put them out in the world or place them in places where, with traditional 3D, we would’ve still been like three years behind.

It’s just elevated everything. Everything’s happened so quickly.

NvvD: VR helped me so much becoming the illustrator that I am, even though I’d never considered myself to be an illustrator. I mean, as a child, I did a lot of traditional 2D drawing. But I studied graphic design for eight years straight, and at that point I was just like, “Well, I’m a type guy. I’m a poster guy. I love me some letters.

And then I put on the VR headset, and I'm like, “Wait, I can also just make this character.” So for me, it was very freeing—not overthinking because maybe I didn’t consider myself an illustrator anyways and being able to find that inside of me, I guess. I’m very grateful for becoming the illustrator that I never was, that I always was as a child but kind of lost through studying and life in general.

NvvD: I’m actually thankful to a lot of client jobs that we’ve had because we started with no knowledge essentially, and every time we got a new client job, it was always a new challenge for the both of us—having to learn something new within 3D.

VY: The fact that we had the freedom to create, to just make and not think too much, like Niels just said, not really overthinking. I think sometimes we’re in denial and we’re like, “No, we’re not saying anything with this work.”

But we have a lot of people saying, “No, you are saying things. You’re making me want to reach out through the screen and touch it.” So I think that the process itself basically gave us this permission to not have to be super technical. We don’t have to be like 3D gods or anything. We can just go and make and really use our inner intuitive selves, present the work, and through that, slowly start to develop the stories.

VY: We never intend to make anyone feel any way. A lot of times when we start to make something, we’ll literally just say, “Let’s make that because it’s cool to us. This doesn’t exist in the world yet. I want to see it. Let’s make it.” But I think the emotional response always comes afterwards, and it’s always with sharing it with people. You don’t actually realize what you’ve made sometimes, and people will react.

We’re just super intuitive—we just make. And maybe this also goes back to being in art school, where a lot of times I was told, “You can’t make something without having a concept or an idea or some sort of profound meaning behind the thing you’re making.” But now, we’re really just being ourselves and saying, “I wanna make it because I wanna make it.” There’s no excuses, you know? So the emotional response is always a bit of shock for us.

VY: We actually purely go VR most of the time. I think this is also something that really helps when we’re pitching for a job or if we’re being approached by a client that says, “This is our idea.” We’ll say, “Give us a day, and we’ll have a 3D version of that idea.” Because we don’t sketch. Actually, our drawing is pretty terrible—like we’re horrific drawers. So we never sketch on paper. We just sketch in 3D. And I think that gives so much more of a feeling about what this work is gonna look like. We just go into the headset, and we just make.

NvvD: We would like to not overthink things and just make for the sake of making it. And it also goes for client work. I think we’re super lucky in that we are just like, “Look, this is what it’s going to look like.” And then sometimes a client will be like, “Well, I don’t know about this thing that you just created for us.” And then we’ll be like, “No worries at all. We’ll try to make another iteration.” But most assignments for us, it’s just like, “Look what we made. Hope you like it.”

We’re so lucky in that sense. We also believe that, and I think a lot of clients can see that as well, the first initial thought that a designer or artist has is the best one like 95% of the time. Working on a team and making adaptations is a whole different ball game, but I think that’s also great. We just personally really enjoy being like, “Hope you like this.” And if they don’t, then it’s absolutely no worries at all, but I do enjoy being kind of in control there and just being like, “Here you go. Accept it or not.”

NvvD: I mean, we can thank our entire career to the hardware because we had no skills in 3D in general. All the steps of VR headsets are actually super helpful to us in terms of color and contrast and seeing and making compositions. Hardware is super, super important. If you look from where we started and where we are now, we’re now able to track our own faces to puppeteer our own characters. We have a motion capture suit now in our studio to record ourselves dancing around and can apply it to our characters.

We get energized from new technologies and mixed reality as well—just playing around with it and being able to see a creature in front of you in your living room and having a lot more sense of depth. The driving factor behind YONK is hardware and also software with AI. When we got Quest Pro, we were like, “OK, what are we gonna do with this? What is unique about it? What can we use it for to make something that we want to create?”

VY: When we first started, we had Rift S, and it was great. It was an amazing thing to start with, but I remember that we had the cables coming out of it, and we always had to be attached to the computer. So there was this kind of limitation there—there was one space that you could VR sculpt in the house and that was it. It was like the allocated chair for VR sculpting.

When we moved up to Quest 2, we were like, “OK, we can take away the cable, so there’s more opportunity.” We could sculpt anywhere, and we could also show other people how to use it. We could, take it with us somewhere, attach it to someone else’s computer, and not feel like we had to bring a load of cables in. It was a bit more freeing.

And then with Quest Pro, it’s kind of like another next level. Instantly when I put it on, I can see the color and the quality is just very, very high. And, like Niels mentioned, that’s very important when we’re creating sculptures. Because we sculpt in color even if we don’t use those colors in the end, in the final render, it will always be in color.

I think one of the most amazing things is when we first went into Figmin XR and put our characters down and they were dancing. I actually gave one a hug, and I was like, “This feels surreal, like I’m actually hugging a character that I’ve made.” To have a character that had been sitting in our archive for a while dancing in front of me and being able to hug it was a bit of a special moment. And maybe that’s also telling us the future of things and how we envision YONK in the future. Right now, it’s great that people enjoy our 2D renders, but it would be amazing if they could enjoy the 3D characters in the way that we know them because we see them every day in VR.”

NvvD: Most of the time, nine out of 10 times, clients will always ask us, “Can you show us the process? Can you show us how you made these things for us?” So when someone approaches us, we’ll just record our process, maybe even do a mixed reality recording where you can see one of us actually creating it in front of them. In the past people have wanted a 3D version of their logos, and then there’s something magical for them to be able to see that process of us putting a 2D picture of their logo in there and us overdrawing that and just giving it a more YONKy look maybe.

And maybe someone is like, “Oh, I would like to have the arm a little bit thicker,” or something of this character. We’ve hopped in Zoom meetings where we’re like, “Well, here you go. You want it this much thicker?” Literally, you know, before we export it and go to the next step. Just to have that certainty from the client, like, “OK, this is what you want, here it is, officially right in front of you”—that's amazing.

VY: Something that we always try to do is take the process and push it out, so the studio isn’t just in VR—we’re sharing it with other people as well. A good example of that is that we do a stream called YONK & Friends where we invite other artists to also work in VR, to come and join us and sculpt together. That’s also a really nice sense of collaboration. And sometimes something happens out of that. Sometimes we’ll make a piece of work together and we’ll share that. It’s a nice way to get input from other VR artists that may do it and approach it completely differently.

The next stage of this is that we’d love to be in a room in VR with clients from across the world, because we’re hardly working with clients actually within the Netherlands—it’s always kind of abroad. But it would be nice to sit around a table and put the character in the middle of the table and be like, “OK, what do you think of this?”

I think as more time goes on, this’ll be more and more integrated, like actually looking at 3D, because we actually get a lot of work for animation and 2D images, but I can see more and more now people are thinking, “Oh, we can make that into a 3D asset for a face filter, or other outlets, like for games and stuff like that.” So it'’ be really nice to do a boardroom meeting but with a giant YONK character in the middle.

NvvD: When we get asked for advice when people are starting out, not just VR but any type of creative job, I always say, “Just start creating. Just make. Don’t overthink it—just make.”

If you want to have a portfolio, you wanna have a job, maybe you wanna have your own studio, nothing really matters. The only thing that matters is that you have to make—that’s the essence of it. And if you’re having fun with it and you’re enjoying yourself, people will see that in your work and in you, and you will almost naturally get opportunities from there. That’s it.

VY: Something I would probably do if I were still in art school right now is just be very aware of what’s happening now—but also what’s coming next. We’ve been able to turn VR sculpting into a job in a sense, which I never thought was a job back when I was studying, and now do it full time and have a lot of fun with it. Just always be on stepping stones and think, “OK, what’s coming next? What’s the next thing that is probably gonna happen?” And just jump at the chance.

NvvD: If someone is starting out with VR and wants to get their feet wet, then I would highly recommend becoming obsessed with it. You have to work, do your stuff, whatever you want to do, but also when you’re back home, maybe browse YouTube, because there’s constantly developments going on. Go through the depths of Reddit and Google searches to find what people are working on. There’s also a big community of people making their own apps. And I think for us, it’s super important to constantly figure out what else is on the horizon and focus on that because in the end, it will help you benefit and create more. In general, you have to be a bit obsessive, I think. It’s important to love what you do and be a bit obsessed with it.

VY: I would say find your way of doing VR. When we started, there was a handful of people that we knew who did VR sculpting, but I think we made a very big decision at the start that it we were gonna enter this space, we were gonna do something of our own and create our own style.

Find an interesting take that someone else hasn’t explored, go into that hole that someone else hasn’t explored and be like, “Oh, you know, I found this crazy app that does this,” and just mess around with it. Break it, almost, you know? Just get experimental. I think that would be my advice.

NvvD: Blender, all the way. It’s the Dutch pride.

VY: I mean, it’s free, which I think is just amazing. And now it’s becoming more and more industry-standard, so it just makes sense. It does all the things that the big expensive ones do, but it’s free, which is very rare in these economic times. So we love it. We love the guy who made it. We love everything about it.

NvvD: We literally sent fan mail to the guy who started the original.

VY: Yeah. We were a bit obsessed. He’s based in the Netherlands. We were like, “Do we go to the office? Maybe it’s a bit creepy.” Just show up and be like, “We love you,” and then leave again. But yeah, he's Dutch. He’s called Tom Roosendaal.

VY: There was just one thing that someone said to me once that sticks with me, and I don’t know why, because it was maybe bad advice. But someone said to me once, “Postpone your career for as long as possible.” And I was like, “What? Do I go on a big holiday? Or do I go and do something?” And I think what she meant by it was to never see the end in sight. Never think, “Okay, I’m comfortable. I’m sitting in this career. I’m doing this. And that’s my job.”

Like, we’re VR sculptors now, and I think we’ll definitely be VR sculptors for much longer. But maybe something comes on the horizon that pivots that, and actually we become something else. And with the growth of this technology, it feels like there’s endless opportunities and endless ways to experiment. So even though that piece of advice is always a bit strange when I say it, I feel like there’s something there. Don’t just sit comfortably, and maybe figure something else out. If you wanna try VR, go and try it out. Borrow a friend’s headset first and then dive deep into it.

NvvD: I’m just super, super glad that, because of VR, we’re able to get our inner child out. We’re able to create something. I’ve been sitting behind a PC now for eight years, with my keyboard and mouse, just being creating, doing graphic design, doing a little bit of 3D. But now, being able to just use my hands and throw clay around and start making the things that I have in my head—it’s magical.

My friends used to call me Fantasy Man when I was like eight, and I think now I’m finally able to get those creatures to come across to everyone that I always had in my head. So I’m super grateful for that, and I think that a lot of people have weird creatures inside their heads that they should try to get out.