We have continue to make Behind the Scene for our projects. It is a great way for us to build our culture and it is hopefully fun to see for others. Here is material from the making of two recent projects from North Kingdom;

Behind the Scene — Toyota Avalon 2011 (NK Art Director; Kalle Engström)
Behind the Scene — Battle of the Cheetos (NK Art Director; Nils Arvidsson)

Some photos I took on our new North Kingdom floor in Skellefteå. We have take over a really cool apartment (180 m2) above our existing one. Our designer Charlotta Havh have worked with the interior design and her dad have done much of the carpenter’s work, as the table here in the new conference room. It is a pretty small world btw; the owner of the apartment was Göran Eriksson, CEO at my old work, Paregos. His son, Marcus Ericsson (Subdisc), who also worked at Paregos, is now living in Vancover and running his own famous studio; Academy.

Reindeer lamp.

The table have a small fire place in the center (fire gel).

We made a hole between our existing studio and the apartment.

The existing office was once upon a time Skellefteås first bank. The black metal door in the end was the bank vault, now a game room.

I know, this is a very late post, but this Christmas I gave my sister Ragnhild a photo book of her two sons. It is based on my photos from 2008 and 2009. The book is printed at Blurb where I ordered a test book three years ago, but back in 2007 I received a book with terrible print result, so I haven’t bother to order anything more from them. However, this time I saw they had upgraded their supplies so I took a shoot, and I was happily surprised when I received the book. The print quality, the colors and the material were really fine this time.

The brothers themselves; Malte (my godson) and Matheo, his older brother. The photos are taken by a Nikon D300.

I ordered a standard landscape format (25×20 cm), with 62 pages (Premium Paper) and a hardcover (image wrap). The cost was US $85 including shipping. Not that bad for a single book with great quality. And no, I am not sponsored by Blurb :)

The book itself is really easy to put together. Blurb have a program called BookSmart that you download to your computer and with that program you can drag and drop your pictures to different templates, but it is also possible to design your own layouts.

Detail study on front and back cover.

Just some more photos from the book…

Three pretty cool campaigns have recently been launched from North Kingdom (sites where myself hasn’t been involved). The first one is for Cheetos; The Battle of the Cheetos. A project made together with our friends at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (San Fransisco).

Second one is Welcome to Avalon Class for Toyota. A site we made together with Saatchi & Saatchi (LA) who came over to work from our Stockholm office for a while. The Avalon site is today’s Site of the Day at FWA btw.

The last project (no picture) is for Auris Hybrid, Toyota. “Months before the launch of the Auris Hybrid, Toyota uses advanced augmented reality technology to send the car on a test drive across your desk.” Site of the Day at FWA, June 28. The Auris project was also made together with Saatchi & Saatchi, but this time with their Düsseldorf office.

I just want to show this cool article (two double-page spreads) from the Korean trend magazine, Adobe sponsored, w.e.b (May 05) about my company; North Kingdom. I have no idea whatsoever what it says when it’s all in Korean, but as long as it look cool it´s fine by me. Great to see that they using my typeface Black Nun Bold for the headline.

However, it’s a shame for the readers that a cool magazine like m.a.p. have a web page like this… It seems to be a standard for many Asia sites to look like that so maybe it’s just me who don’t get it?

I have been invited by Ståle Gerhardsen to a design/typography conference tomorrow called hello VARSKO!. I will speak about North Kingdom, adidas, design, illustration, typography… and some other things that could be inspiring. Therefore I have spent my Friday night on my sofa, preparing my presentation. Luckily the World Cup is still running on the TV, and it will be very inspiring to hear the other designers talk tomorrow and to see what’s going on in Trondheim.

VASKO is a society that supports creative visual communication and has its focus on the artists that dare challenge and break rules. Through exhibitions and happenings the organisation wants to show the world what is going on in the design underground in Norway, especially in our region Trondheim.

More recent awards here.

I have just finished mine and Kenny Lindströms kitchen illustration, so tomorrow I will send it to the printhouse because instead of paint it we will print, just to save some time. The main idea was to mix our styles.

My work was concept, copy, making the lady and put everything together. The idea is also to make a black stain on the table underneath
where the coffee is pouring. When I wrote the copy I wanted to achieve a feeling that the picture is taken from a saga, a story (not final);

“Her coffee smelt nice, but it felt like somebody was watching her. It was chilly outside and the aroma of the coffee now had a touch of salt. Like a deep lake of oil, her drink now took on a new dimension. Another side of the kingdom was now presented.”

— Work in progress

The illustration is made on a Cintiq 12WX, based on a photography I took a couple of years ago. When the plan was to paint everything we wanted a clean and simple illustration, which we kept even if it now will be printed.

Kenny Lindströms beautiful octopus. Original file in illustrator above. Below after my coloring.

Earlier this week Creative Summit (a VIP event, open only for 150 delegates) took place in Skellefteå. It is an event operated by The Lodge, a creative hub consisting of prolific Skellefteå-based companies working within the field of digital media.

It was some really inspiring days with Brian Solis, Peter Espersen (Lego), Peter Engel (Zentropia) and Teenage Engineering among others. If you want to read about it, a great sum up is made here by Filmarc:

Creative Summit — Day 1
Creative Summit — Rounding up

Foto by Paulina Holmgren.

Some of the projects I was part of last year as an Interactive Art Director for North Kingdom have recently been awarded which feels really great! I know, I use to say awards is not that important, but still, when you got one it is awesome!

NEW YORK FESTIVALS — Gold World Medal for for adidas Teamgeist
ONE SHOW INTERACTIVE — 2 Silver Pencil for adidas Teamgeist & Swedish Armed Forces.
CLIO AWARDS — Bronze for adidas Teamgeist.

GE Smartgrid from North Kingdom/Goodby won silver and bronze at One Show interactive.

Next week it’s Cannes, so I will keep my fingers crossed. I had tickets to go there but I will stay home and work instead.. Well, someone needs to do that too.

Yesterday our little digital shop turned seven years. It has been an amazing ride since 2003, from being only two the first years to 36 today. The picture with the two great posing guys ;) is from May 2005 when we did our first trip to US and New York. We had just hired our first team member and the plan was to never be more then ten and to keep the business in the north of Sweden, in Skellefteå. Today we are over 20 just in Stockholm. How life can turn…

We had a great first year 2003/2004. I had launched my portfolio, Designchapel, and we did Vodafone Future which become the worlds most awarded website 2004. That gave us a great start even the branch had some rough years back then. It also helped us that we where located in the north part of Sweden as we got some great support from the government and local community in making this all possible.

A huge thanks to all great colleagues, our partners and dared clients! Without you this journey would still only have been just a dream.

Great guidelines from Seth Godin! So simple and so true!

Word Templates — Unfortunately it has been taken a while for us to finish our corporate identity program. Right now some guys are helping us out with making templates for our Word documents. However, it’s not easy when I’m a detail perfectionist and they don’t have a clue of what kerning or spacing is. But I’m an optimist and hopefully, after a couple of weeks, we will have a front page ready :)

North Kingdom Notebook — This is going to print this week; our own designed notebooks (A5). I have also designed some personal stickers for our crew can be added on the cover.

On Monday FWA will publish our wallpaper kit to their special edition 10th Anniversary collection. We where invited by Rob Ford together with 9 other great agencies (FWA 10 top winning agencies) like Goodby, B-Reel, Big Spaceship and EVB for this special occasion. It was of course a big honor for us, but also a chance to make a quick piece of art which is always challenging and fun.

Get the wallpapers here — FWA 10th Anniversary wallpapers by North Kingdom

If you like the font I have used and made, you can download that one here.

When we had no time whatsoever we made a quick collaboration in house. We didn’t have any directions among us more then just go “bananas”, to make something we wanted to have on our own desktops, and to keep it black and white as our graphic profile.

The directive from Rob Ford was; “The wallpaper should include the FWA logo, your own logo, the number 10. I am happy for the FWA logo to be manipulated in any creative way rather than having it placed, as is, on a nice image.”

We started with the wallpaper I did for couple of month ago for North Kingdom Soundtrack called Dear Deer Black (pic 1), as a base for everything. Félix Hill was first out (pic 2) and Riccardo Tagliabue second (pic 3) and I finished it (pic 4). The theme become as weird as the nature you can see in our showreel I think.

For the iPhone wallpaper I wanted to create a picture that worked alone but also of course when the iPhone is locked. I solved that making a simple reflection that is placed precisely on the “”slide to unlock” graphic.

— iPhone

— Desktop

Last week David Eriksson (CD/CEO) and myself came back from Toronto and FITC 2010. North Kingdom where invited by Shawn Pucknell to speak at this, in my eyes, very professional managed conference with nice variation of speakers. FITC is an event for the design and technology community, which is now held for the 9th year. I where in Toronto and spoke back in 2007 and was already then very impressed by the arrangement at Hilton Hotel. This year’s theme was Playground. ”Which is all about…playing!”

All photos here below is taken from FITC’s photostream on Flickr

During Saturday, the day before everything started, FITC had a ‘Get a Job’ day where we spoke about how to apply and what you as a student should think about. If you are a designer it is pretty much about portfolio, portfolio and portfolio, and that you can work in a team, which is just as important.

We also participated in a couple of panels. I joined a pretty interesting panel called ”From Solo to CEO - Managing Growth” together with Hoss Gifford, Paul Pattison, Grant Skinner and R Blank.

“What happens when somebody goes from being a solo developer/designer into the owner or leader of their own studio?”

I talked mostly about how hard it is to keep up the quality when you are growing and how you have to focus on what you are best at instead having lots of different roles and trying to be all over the place. Also you have to let things go… which can be very difficult sometimes. David joined a panel called “Playing for Keeps in a Global Digital Playground”.

Our talk was going to be the last of Day 1. We called our presentation “To live in North Kingdom” because we were going to talk about how we work and think in our everyday work. We took them through the development of North Kingdom Showreel and our digital campaign for Adidas Germany; Teamgeist.

The audience was over 1000, so it felt really great that we had prepared our material well. The worse I know is to get up on stage and not being enough prepared. I mean, people have paid to hear us, so the least we can do is to prepare I think :)
After our talk, when we caught up on twitter, it seemed as people liked our presentation which made us very happy. Most interesting seems to been our showreel, how we handled weak deliveries in the Adidas project and our F.U.C.K. rule (Function, Usability, Cosmetica and Kärlek (Kärlek means Love in Swedish)).

Here is a short summary of our presentation by Dominic Gelineau for Applied Arts Wired;

“It is pretty nice when you get to learn how a renown agency like North Kingdom (@NorthKingdom) is working. I had seen this presentation 2 years ago and they did a good job to give new content by presenting a new project Adidas Teamgeist. They walked us through the production of this project that was heavy on video, illustration and 3D.
What I got out of this is the extreme importance they give to storytelling and to detail. A story seem to be at the heart of everything they do be it the showreel or a client project. As for being anal for details it is hard to get further than these guys, but it shows up in the work. What they do is simply amazing. The have shown sketches and first draft of 3D rendering that seemed fine to me, but where rejected. That was the problem exactly they were just fine, somethings were off, they didn’t feel exactly like the rest of the site; back to the drawing board!”

It seems they got the message when we talk about storytelling & details at least :)

We also had the chance to check out some of the other presentations. It was great to meet Scott Hansen, (ISO50) again, who talked about ”Blending Analog and Digital”. He did a great talk about inspiration and his thoughts behind his work. We talked a lot about e-commerce on the evening and ever since I met him in Barcelona 2007 I have been very interested to start my own shop like his. So if everything turns out well, I will have my own shop pretty soon.

It was also great to meet our old friend from Skellefteå & Paregos again; Marcus Eriksson (Subdisc & WeAreAcademy). They are doing some really great stuff in Vancover!

Other presentations I saw worth mention are;

Bartek Drozdz, “From Flash to Unity (And Back)”
He was showing some stuff he had made with Unity, a new 3D technology for the web. He visited our office a couple of weeks before Toronto and I was already then blown away by the possibilities of Unity.

Takayuki (fladdict) Fukatsu, “Cool Japanese Hour!”
He talked about his own company Art & Mobile who creates iPhone applications. Amazing how big the market is for these kind of products. He told us he had over 600 000 downloads so far, which is very impressive! He also presented a iPhone Book for children where he had combined an iPhone with a children’s book. I am sure we will see more of these products in the future!

Jared Ficklin, “Eyes Can Hear, 5 Ways“
As I saw Barteks presentation I just had the chance to see the end of Jareds talk which was also very interesting topic! He gave RFID tags to over 3000 people at a big event and made data visualization of it. Everything from how much beer they where drinking to how long time they spent at the toilet. Awesome!

John Underkoffler, “It Has To Be This”
Great to see how Oblong Industries created the interfaces for Minority Report and how they did it in real life. John is a MIT graduate and was science adviser also at Iron Man and Aeon Flux.

That´s all. We hope to see North Kingdom at FITC in the future as well :)

Daniel Illics (CD North Kingdom) father in Borås have now made our fireplace. What are left now are some final touches on the surface layer and to fix the faked fire so it looks good. More to come…

Photos by Daniel Illic (on iPhone).

Check out the 3D sketch here.

This is cool! For the second time the last three years, we are on the 2010 Creative 50 list. It’s a list where Ad Age and Creativity celebrate the year’s most inspiring thinkers and innovators.

“Welcome to the fifth annual Creativity 50. Each year, we cite those people and companies that made the biggest impact across all areas of creative culture. There are advertising and marketing people on the list. There are also tech pioneers, designers, directors, entrepreneurs, and others who challenged the established way of doing things and inspired with their action.”

Read the whole article here: creativity-online.com

Creativity writes about North Kingdom;

“From GE’s Smart Grid augmented-reality site with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, to Adidas Teamgeist for the German sports brand, North Kingdom has built a Swedish digital-production agency with work that can translate to any culture, anywhere in the world… The agency actually likes the challenge of working with shops in other time zones and thinks its northern location, away from the creative hotbeds of Amsterdam and New York, means its designers and developers can concentrate on one project at time, since “every single pixel needs love.”

I’m not so fond that they only have the co-founders presented thou, when it is an award for the whole team; from Gothenburg, through Klaverström and Stockholm up to Skellefteå.

However, keep up the good work folks, it’s the third time that is the hardest ;)

Cool also to see Lady Gaga on the same list! She is doing some crazy stuff out there! However, I would rather do a project with her then be on the same list… :)

TOP 50 Creative People
(These are not presented in any specific rank order)

Roger Stighall, Robert Lindstrom, David Eriksson, Co-founders, North Kingdom
Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan, Founders, Posterous
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Architect, Microsoft Live Labs
Craig Allen, Art Director, and Eric Kallman, Copywriter, Wieden and Kennedy Portland
Karin Dreijer Andersson (aka Fever Ray), Musical Artist
Marco Arment, Lead Developer, Tumblr; Creator, Instapaper
Kathryn Bigelow, Director
Neill Blomkamp, Director, RSA
Alex Bogusky, Chief Creative Insurgent, MDC
James Cameron, Director
Roy Choi, Mark Manguera, Founders, Kogi
Damon Collins, ECD RKCR/Y&R
Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvedurai, Co-founders, Foursquare
Andreas Dahlqvist, ECD DDB Stockholm
Bart Decrem, CEO Tapulous
David Droga, Founder, Creative Chairman, Droga5
Dave Eggers, Author, Founder, McSweeney’s
Daniel Ek, Co-founder/CEO, Spotify
James Farley, Group VP Global Marketing, Ford
Cindy Gallop, Entrepreneur, Founder IfWeRanTheWorld.com
Lady Gaga, Musical Artist
Christian Haas, Creative Director/Associate Partner, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
James Hilton, Co-founder/CCO and Rei Inamoto CCO, AKQA
Damon Horowitz, Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, Aardvark
Mike Hughes, President, Martin Agency
Jonathan Ive, Senior VP Industrial Design, Apple
Jan Jacobs and Leo Premutico, Co-founders, Creative Directors, Johannes Leonardo
Matt Jones, Director of Design, Berg
Spike Jonze, Director, MJZ
Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom, co-founders/CCOs, Mother New York
Ashton Kutcher, Founder, Katalyst Media
Tom Kuntz, Director, MJZ
Michael Lebowitz, Founder/CEO, Big Spaceship
Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, Co-Founders, Opening Ceremony
Pranav Mistry, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab
Ty Montague, Co-president, CCO North America, JWT
Tor Myhren, CCO, Grey New York
Filip Nilsson, Creative Director/Chairman, Forsman & Bodenfors
David “Nobby” Nobay, Creative Chairman, Droga5 Sydney
Rob Reilly, Andrew Keller, Jeff Benjamin, ECDs, Crispin Porter Bogusky
Eric Rodenbeck, Founder/Creative Director, Stamen Design
Vivian Rosenthal, Jesse Seppi, Co-founders/Designers/Directors, Tronic
Matt Ross, Creative Director; Matt Oxley, Head of Tech, Tribal DDB London
Keith Schofield, Director, Caviar/El Nino
KR Sridhar, CEO, Bloom Energy
Matthew Szymczyk, Hans Forsman, Creative Directors, Zugara
Iain Tait, Global Interactive ECD, Wieden and Kennedy
Andrey Ternovskiy, Founder of Chatroulette
Ray Tintori, Director, Partizan
Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO, CCO, Smule

It took us seven years to get an Golden Egg but finally we got one! We’ve been very lucky and quite spoiled with international awards so we are really happy to receive the biggest award here in Sweden. I think we haven’t succeed in Sweden earlier because we have been working mostly with international clients/agencies and with projects that has been to little “commercial”. I think the Golden Egg have more been focusing on the idea instead of execution which is good. The motivation from the jury also talking about these big flashproductions, questioning if we will see them in the future (an interesting question). And not to forget; the Swedish agencies are doing really good stuff so the competing have been really hard.

The Golden Egg was given to The Swedish Armed Forces project which was a pretty fast production which we made last spring. The motivation is (in Swedish);

“Personlighetstestet / DDB Stockholm / North Kingdom
2009 var inte de stora Flash-produktionernas år. Det var året då alla skulle gå åt det sociala, mobila eller det virala hållet. Men med en ordentlig dos kreativitet och ett gediget hantverk lyckades ett gäng duktiga människor skapa en helhet som ingen annan kom i närheten av. De skapade en lockande upplevelse som var lika smart som den var snygg. Kanske är detta den sista stora flashproduktionen av sitt slag. Men om så är fallet, kunde vi inte fått en bättre avslutning.”

Big big thanks to Försvarsmakten, DDB, Jesper Kouthoofd, Illianced, Dinahmoe and Stopp!

More about the project here.

Air France did I finish last week on my flight from Paris to Miami. I have again used the Brush application which have been updated with layer function since last time I used it. You can also import photos from your photo library. That´s how I did the copy; I took a photo on a page at the airplane, imported it to Brushes and painted Air Fran(ce) on the top layer. The color & contrast correction is made with the Mill Color application.

MeBot — MIT’s most expressive telepresence robot yet.
Xbox Project Natal Painting Demo — Xbox are for sure doing some interesting stuff with their Natal Project!
The Mill’s “Apples” — Amazing use of an iPhone and a custom tracking rig together with CGI

The Wired Tablet App — A video demonstration from Wired and their thoughts.
Mag+ — Nice research project from Bonnier R&D. And great move to launch it a week before iPad :)

Nitendo Facetracking — This is cool. 3D combined with facetracking on a DS. I think we will see lot of this in the future.
3D Face Technology — Little old footage taken from Japanese TV. But still very good!

“And Then There Was Salsa” — Very cool Vimeo takeover!
Macro Kingdom — 5DmarkII and a MP-E 65mm lens. Amazing!
Rhonda — A new cool way to draw stuff in 3D.

OK Go “This Too Shall Pass” — A really cool music video by James Frost.
Three reasons why storytelling is the key to success — Great and simple article about storytelling online.
10 Big Marketing Predictions For 2010 — Let us see how much will be true!

Some sketches from a concept I’m working on right now. The characters had to be very simple so I continue to work with the style I made for The Lodge showreel a couple of years ago. I have no idea if we will use these small fellows but they where really fun to do :) Next step will be to build them in 3D if choose to continue. The project will be launched first after the summer so it is a very early sneak peek.

Another drawing I made on my iPhone with the Brush application. I made it when I spent some nice days at the Stockholm archipelago this summer.

For the moment I’m working with our corporate identity which is very important for companies in our branch. The idea behind our clean, sophisticated black & white style is to make an identity that don’t take focus from our projects and that we can keep for a while. Ok, we have already kept the logotype and style for a while but we have never had a complete package which I trying to finish now. My study was actually focused on print so it is fun to do that kind of job now and then…

I have always enjoyed listen to music meanwhile I work creative, specially when I’m sitting at the office or at coffee shops. For me it’s so important that I can shut down everything around me to find my creative mood, my creative “capsule”.

Here is my playlist on Spotify for you who also like to work with easy listening music: Designchapel — A creative day at work

When we did our showreel for North Kingdom last year we also made our own soundtrack together with Andreas Lundmark. I have used his music before when he was a part of Elodie, a great group from Skellefteå with a original style. The last thing I wanted for our showreel was a high tempo pop/rock/techno tune which almost every showreel uses today. Instead we wanted to give our reel an odd story with a calm pleasant feeling.

The soundtrack turned out so good so I wanted to give it a proper record cover with our Dear Deer Lady. I tried a new, quite fast, technique where I painted (with Wacom Cintiq 12wx) on top of a photo I took a few years ago. To fit the graphic profile of North Kingdom I made it black & white.

Download wallpapers — Dear Deer Black, 1920×1200 px (zip)

Download soundtrack — Creatvt (North Kingdom) (mp3)
Download typeface — Black Nun Bold (Illustration file) (.zip)

I have to recommend the latest issue of Computer Arts Projects, “A decade of design”. It’s about how the design industry has changed since 2000. A decade where myself have been most inspired by Büro Destruct, The Designers Republic and Attik. It’s sad though that I have not seen so much from these agencies the last 5 years, and the worst is that 2009, after 23 years in operation, TDR closed for business.

I started to work as an Interactive Art Director back in 1998, so the section “Decade of web design” gave me some reel nostalgia because Computer Arts have chosen one site/project/agency from each year that they thought woiuld represented that years internet evolution best. Who didn’t remember when 2Advanced entered the scene 2001 or Praystation back at 2003? Facebook represented 2006 and 2007 by Wordpress.

The coolest thing was to see our own Vodafone Future from North Kingdom represented 2004! If you would told me that back in 2003, I would think you where insane! I mean, we where just a tiny tiny agency up in the north, doing our job.

“When this website launched, it portrayed the future of technology through a progressive and innovative design that went on to be one of the most highly awarded sites of all time. It was also the only site ever to pick up both the FWA Site of the Year and FWA People’s Choice Award in the same year.”

And to correct CA; it’s not true that Vodafone is the only site ever to pick up both SOTY and PCA the same year. Our “Get the Glass” did the same 2008, not to forget :)

Yes we have moved into our new Stockholm office but it’s still a looot of work to do before it’s all set. One thing I’m looking at right now is a fireplace we will build in the foyer. We talk lot about storytelling within NK, the work we do and what we want to accomplish with our projects. The picture here below did I take in Svansele, where we had some teamdays 2008. This picture gave us the idea to actually build a fireplace in our office (with gel fire ofcourse), where we in a near future, hopefully, will gather around for storytelling and to create new great ideas.

Svansele 2008. North Kingdom tell stories…. Hans Eklund, Daniel Illlic, Klas Kroon, Mikael Forsgren, David Eriksson, Mathis Lindgren, Daniel Wallström and Lucian Trofin.

Inspiration for the design have been found from old fireplaces in north and from the lovely “Zero” from Ak47 in Italy.

I spent this Sunday at “String” on Söder, Stockholm, with a thermos of coffee and my sketchbook because I needed to come up with some ideas for some wall paints to our new North Kingdom office. Damn nice day btw, “String” is a really great place. This is a first concept drawing for the kitchen. I will make the paintings with Kenny Lindström, who will work on the jellyfishes (or whatever we do there) on this one. The idea behind it? Well, I just wanted to continue to work with our strange, odd nature, which we presented in our showreel from last year.

During my last vacation I brought my iPhone loaded with movies from TED.com. These short talks (3-10 min) had a big variaty of both quality but most of them are very interested listen at. Here are a few that caught my mind so far:

Stefan Sagmeister — The power of time off
”Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.”
— Very interested so hear about how they are doing at Sagmeister Inc. to keep up the creativity. I love to see people finding their own way to work because good creativity isn’t, and have never been, something you can get from a line production. Just sitting in front of your computer will never make you very successful.
From the sabbatical year Stefan found out that “Everything we designed in the seven years following the first sabbatical, had originated in that year” Of course, it is hard to do as Sagmeister Inc. if you not are very economical independent, but we can learn a lot from their thinking.

Richard St. John — 8 secrets of success
“Why do people succeed? Is it because they’re smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.”
— This is a very short movie about how to success in your business. Lot of humor but so so true! Check it out!

Imogen Heap — “Wait It Out”
“Imogen Heap plays a powerful stripped-down version of “Wait It Out,” from her new record, Ellipse.”
— I just love her!