This year we had one project in the FWA’s big final; Best site of the Year. Myself wasn’t involved in this one when Nils Arvidsson (North Kingdom) was our interactive art director. Actually, I haven’t done so many cases at all during 2010 when I had been involved in other stuff/roles within North Kingdom. However, I hope to do lot more work during 2011 when I’m back on the drawing table full time.

From North Kingdom blog;

“Battle of the Cheetos made it all the way to the third spot in 2010 FWA People’s Choice Awards – Website of the Year. Thanks to all of you who voted for our piece that we developed together with our old friends at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.” (Case movie by GPS)

View the project here — Battle of the Cheetos

Last month we launched a pretty cool project at Times Square for LG on their huge LED screen. A project within the project was to create a character, a process I will show here below. Usually I don’t work as an illustrator but sometimes it happens…

Overall we created over 50 characters during two hectic weeks…

A — Final direction from client B — My redesign and modification of the character when we wanted him more mature and cool C — Klaus Lyngeled (Character Designer och Animation Director) did some tweaks on my sketch D — The final character made in Unity 3D

When a project have a character in focus it’s of course super important to give him a look that works both for the brands philosophy and the project itself, a combination that can be very tricky sometimes. This autumn I helped one of our teams with some early concept ideas and development of a character for LG. The character was going to have artificial intelligence and “live” inside the biggest LED screen in NYC; a huge 15×25 meters display (1984×1136 resolution) on Times Square. His name is Gil (Life Is Good backwards) and he’s LG’s Good News Ambassador. Gil is animated in real-time 3D (Unity 3d) which means instead of using loops of pre-rendered animations, he actually can respond differently to messages, weather reports or news feeds so that he feels really alive

   More pictures and information here.

The 12th of May 2011, Marcus Ivarsson and I will speak at D&AD President’s Lectures in London, invited by Jane Morley.

About D&AD President’s Lectures — D&AD Events exist to inspire, stimulate discussion & fuel debate. Speakers at D&AD President’s Lectures represent the best in their creative fields whilst Sharp’ners offer the opportunity to share opinion & exchange ideas in a more informal setting. D&AD Workout is a series of challenging workshops taught in unusual ways by unexpected people.

Suggested title — Digital Monarchy
“D&AD Black Pencil-winning North Kingdom is a world leading digital creative agency. Their spiritual home is Skellefteå, a small town next to the polar circle in Sweden. Depending on the season, the team enjoy 23 hours of sunshine or darkness a day.

For North Kingdom’s debut lecture in the UK, co-founder Robert Lindström and senior producer Marcus Ivarsson will delve deep inside their favourite projects to and explain in detail how they were created.”

Thanks for these fine words Jane! It is our debut lecture for D&AD but we have been in UK before. Actually, I did my absolute first lecture ever in London back in 2000, for Flash Forward.

However, if you are in London this spring, come and join us for a fun night.

For a couple of days ago I got my test prints for the FWA award certificates from a local print house, just to check the design. All new winners will receive these from FWA via post, starting January 2011, except for SOTD winners who will just get a pdf.

Old winners will also get these certificates. Rob Ford; “Initially, I think the certificates might be printed for all SOTY and PCA winners I can still get in touch with. For previous SOTM winners, I think it makes sense to send them a PDF which they can print from themselves.”

The famous FWA digital award ribbons are vectorized and placed in the lower right corner.

Last week I was in New York for some interesting meetings and for the launch of our LG project (more about that later). I have been in contact with the great illustrator Celia Calle for many many years and now, finally I had a chance to meet her in NYC one night. We had a lot of interesting discussions over some wine. She encouraged me to start illustrate again and she was also so kind to give me her new book and one of her lovely prints (which fits my Designchapel very well :).

She made fun of me when I had so hard to find time for our date because of the LG launch.

Well, it took a while, but now on Designchapel is also on Facebook. So if you want to follow the updates via Facebook, check this out.

Our fireplace have been in our foyer for a while, but it’s first now we can call it done, when the surface has been missing the right touch.

To get the right style we first used signal red spray all over the plate. After the color dried, I used sandpaper and paint thinner to scrub away some color, owensoot to make it darker and dirtier and salt water to give the surface some rust.

The fireplace is actually working when we are using bio fuel in three small tanks under the surface.

The final result become pretty close to my rough 3D sketch, even if it looked pretty bad.

The fireplace — work in progress II.
The fireplace — work in progress II.

The installation at Skellefteå Airport is now built. It’s a fantastic feeling to see how your sketches become reality and it looks as good as you hoped for. Skellefteå Snickericentral (SCC) have done an amazing work, they are great cabinetmaker! The whole thing will be launched next week so I keep my fingers crossed from New York where I’m right now, that everything turns out good! We still have some minor problems with the technology but I think everything will work smoothly. We will launch the web version and some documentary movies from the Airport within a week I hope.

The very first test of the screen on place. December 10th, 2010, at 12:38 AM. Mia Vallmark, Project Manager, stands in front of the for moment only blue screen, like a digital gateway..

   More pictures and information here.

WORK IN PROGRESS — This autumn I got an amazing assignment from Rob Ford at FWA; to design four prints for their awards.

The basic idea was to make something that would look good on your wall, and even better if you would have a collection. Rob Ford wanted to have a different award certificate for FWA, a vision I liked very much. However, the design have to be simple in a way, when it still is an award. You should be proud of it, and not feeling that you have a piece of art on the wall you maybe don’t like. The typeface and the design are taken from the FWA digital award ribbons, which made me start thinking of knitting, which also looks like pixel art in a way. Both knitting and pixelart are just handcraft, which matched the idea perfect when the projects you see on FWA are filled with that

Some lines from the brief;

“They could all be the same format but with a slightly different colour style to resemble the level of award. I’ve attached all of the award ribbons in case they help in any way and I have also attached the FWA logo in eps format.”

“I have thought in the past how it might be cool to have a 3D trophy image on the award certificate but I really have no requirements on the design style or idea. Of course, FWA is all about being progressive, original and innovative so I’m sure you will have that in mind anyway.”

(The award would not come with a wooden frame btw, I just wanted to see how it would look like.)

The four certificates — SOTM (Site Of the Month, SOTY (Sity Of The Year), PC (People’s Choice) and SOTD (Site Of The Day). I added some awards from us at North Kingdom to see how it could look like.

SOTM, SOTY and PC will be printed and sent over. SOTD will be available for downloading. Some test prints will be made next week.

— This post will shortly be updated.

A first rough body tracking test from out little lab project Woodbot Pilots. We have used a 82-inch display from Samsung, Unity 3 technology and a camera from a local Skellefteå company called Fotonic, who manufactures 3D cameras, based on time-of-flight (TOF) technology.

The difference between Xbox Kinect and our camera is that we are using TOF when Kinect is using a structured light and can maintain tracking through a range up to 3.6 meters when Fotonic have a max range of 7 meters. The Kinect sensor is built for use in living rooms and our camera has been optimised for industrial and demanding environments. Both cameras are using imaging CMOS sensors

The huge display was sent to Skellefteå today where we will finish the work within the next two weeks. More stuff will be posted soon.

Link to Vimeo.

WORK IN PROGRESS, NORTH KINGDOM — Right now we at North Kingdom are doing a really cool, but still secret, project for a client in USA. One part of the assignment is to build our special designed character in real. I have never been involved in physical character building before, but I had Tobias Allanson in mind during our whole creative concept period. Tobias, who’s from my hometown Skellefteå, created a character called Gorg for Ingemar Backmans snowboard company Allian for 8-9 years ago. A very adorable character I just loved. Backman is also the co-founder of the very cool clothing brand WeSC.

These photos did I take yesterday at Allansons studio here in Stockholm. Our character is very naked for the moment (which is good, otherwise I couldn’t show him) but at least you can see some technical solutions which looks pretty cool. More to come…

— This post is also found at the North Kingdom blog.

Kenny Lindström’s and my wallpaper is finally on place at North Kingdom’s kitchen in Stockholm. I named the work “En kopp kaffe” which means a cup of coffee in Swedish. I also added some lines to the illustration to make it more as a part of a story;

Her coffee smelt nice, but it felt like somebody was watching her. Even if the morning was chilly, she didn’t understand why her coffee had a touch of salt.

Like a deep lake of oil, her drink now took on a new dimension. The other side of the kingdom was now presented.

More work in progress here.

We ordered the wallpaper at Your Wallpaper here in Stockholm. Decorator was Lina Fall.

When the wallpaper arrived a week after my order, I put it directly on the floor to see how it looked like. And yes, the quality was good! The color range was not perfect but for that price I would say it is ok. The price for this wallpaper was 1317 SEK plus taxes.

WORK IN PROGRESS — SSC Skellefteå will build the physical building for Woodbot Pilots which hopefully will be in place mid December. I visited SSC this Monday discussing material and here is the “blueprint” I just received in my mail. Personally I haven’t worked so much on the project the last three weeks when I have been working in other projects, but it is pretty much about programming now. However, next week I hopefully will find some time to design the game graphics.

After Toronto this spring, I have got an invitation to speak at FITC in Tokyo and Seoul this December, but unfortunately I can’t go when the timing wasn’t the best. It’s a really shame when I just love Japan and I have never been to Korea. However, Shawn Pucknell, FITC, also invited me to another interested event, this time in Austia in June 2011. FITC is working with a music festival called Springfestival in Austia to produce an interactive event in addition to their existing music event. It seems to be a pretty big event with “over 250 national and international DJs, Live-Acts & Visual-Artists, 14 event locations (4 main & 10 small) and 15000+ people attend every year in total”. Sounds like the Springfestival can be pretty cool. It’s a really honor and inspiration for us to visit these events to speak about our work. Usually I don’t speech so often cause of ongoing projects and it takes some time to prepare this trips, but it happens maybe once or twice a year.

Note — FITC at Springfestival isn’t confirmed yet.

I did a first quick test of our new photo studio this week. The photo is taken by a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50mm f1.4 and the model is my younger sister Rebecca.

Last week I worked on some character design for an ongoing pitch. The client wanted another direction thou so it never went further than this. So today it is just garbage, but that’s life. At least it was fun to do. The cool typeface is called CAPSET, made by my friend Andreas Philström.

   More pictures and information here.

WORK IN PROGRESS — One of our conference rooms in Stockholm has got a really cool textile wall this week, made by Lina Zedig. It is an amazing work that contain 250 km line, 50 km criss-cross stitch and over 40 different colorings of textile. More pictures when the room is finished…

In the other conference room, Lina Fall is painting some furniture….

Today at our teamday for our Stockholm office, we have been talking about how we work and live. What makes us unique and how can we make our culture stronger? Pic 1 — Meeting around our fireplace. Pic 2 — Group work in the mini loft. Pic 3 — Dinner at our kitchen. Great day!

(Photos taken by iPhone 4 and the AutoStitch app. Color correction via Lightroom)

The coffee is pouring… I’m adding some last details to our wallpaper. Placed at North Kingdom kitchen, Stockholm.

NORTH KINGDOM, WORK IN PROGRESS — For the moment I’m working as a Creative Director/ Art Diretctor / Designer with a little different project then I am used to. It’s an interactive installation that will be placed at Skellefteå Airport this winter. An installation where we will use a very interesting 3D camera technique and a huge 82 inch one-touch screen. If you have seen Microsoft’s Project Natal you maybe know what I’m talking about, it’s a 3D technique that can be used both in games and installation like ours, but also for instore installations, interactive shop windows and much more.

The 3D camera is developed and made by Optronic in Skellefteå and it’s using Time-of-flight (TOF) technology (can be explained as radar operating with light). More information about the camera at Fotonic.

“With the technology, the time it takes for a very short laser pulse to travel to a certain object is measured, allowing distance to be calculated with great accuracy. Using a unique sensor chip, the distance to each individual pixel in the scene can be measured, creating a complete three-dimensional image.”

Video — Proof-of-concept of hand controlled car game
Video — 3D camera test

The basic idea behind the concept was to make something pretty simple (orders from the 3D cam tech guys) and focus on the visual, because we don’t want any bugs when it will be a public installation. That gave us directions to use as few joints in the bodies as possible. Therefore I had to figure out how to make them so simple as possible but still interesting. The first sketches I did were these fluffy things, which was made for one of our first ideas around an interactive mirror. From the beginning our ideas were mostly to make something arty, focusing on something we called Flight DNA (when every flight trip is unique), and digital mirrors with avatars (which is still on the track in another shape). However, it felt little lame, so we ended up with a game instead that anyone could easily understand. During this period I was working a lot with Per-Mattias Nordkvist, Improove (who I worked together with at Paregos in Skellefteå, way back).

(These fluffy characters are now moved to another ongoing project).

When we moved over to the game idea I wanted characters with more attitude and possibilities to fly. When Skellefteå is famous for its wood culture, what would be more right to do the characters in wood? And what would be cooler to make these wooden characters into robots? Above is the first concept sketches I made in Illustrator, showing the different bodies, heads, etc. It is also showing some first ideas of how the environment will look like.

Here are we working with the texture, colors and placement of the fabricated logotypes (which will give the characters a racer attitude). Pawel Wilkos from Ars Thanea is helping me out with the 3D when Mathias Lindgren, our 3D master, went on paternity leave. So big thanks to our old friends at Ars Thanea! We are own you one!

When I came up with the idea of these wooden robots/pilots it felt like we could do something more around them. Could we make them like a brand, could we take them further to other platforms? It’s some ideas we now are looking at, so I really hope we will see them in other platforms soon. Right now we are actually doing some first tests on iPhone (something I have been dreaming about over three years now). My intention is also to make a shop so people can order them as 15-20 cm high design wooden characters, limited edition. I hope to connect our local wood companies together to make it happen. If not, let me know if you have any ideas how to sponsor the project.

   More pictures and information here.

Just some photos from this summer. Skråmträsk is our summer cottage, close to Skellefteå. The other photos are from Stockholm. The kids belongs to my sister Ragnhild; Mateho & Malte.

   More pictures and information here.

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.

   More pictures and information here.

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.

   More pictures and information here.

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 found a really nice post (via Twitter) on Abduzeedo about my work as design inspiration. It made my day :)

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.

Last night we received some awards at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. We got one Silver for Försvarsmakten together with DDB Stockholm and two bronze for adidas Teamgeist. No gold this time but a lions is always a lion.

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.