Every time someone asks a designer to “Just make it look pretty”, a baby kitten dies.

- Samantha Toy, Designer at Twitter

Amazing work by Sagmeister & Walsh. From http://thecreativeinfluence.net/portfolio/interviewsagmeister_walsh/

Hyper Island is now in Singapore!

I often find it hard to describe what I do to people outside the industry. It usually ends up with them having a vague idea of me doing something with websites. So for your sake – and mine – I’ve decided to recapture 2012 and let you know what I’ve been working on for the past year – and what’s to come. Unfortunately, on some projects I’m not able to go into details.

January

January started off where December left, working on the global redesign project for IKEA.com. January and February were my last months on the project so a lot of time was spent developing style guidelines so the development team could better implement the new design.

I was also the module leader and responsible for the course “Visual Design & Branding” at Hyper Island.

For FiveStarDay, I did the design work for Revent – a small and quick project, but always fun to work with Mattias.

February

In February I finished the 7-month long project for IKEA to proceed to speak at my second Hyper Island Master Class – and to participate for all three days for the first time! It’s an excellent course and I encourage everyone that’s wants to know more about digital to sign up for a course. Not only did I get to do a workshop with highly skilled people from all over the world, I got to hear inspiring talks from people I admire, Daniel Ilic, Lisa Lindström, Sveinung Skaalnes and many more.

I also got to work with another inspiration of mine – Martin Kann, the genius behind album covers for Swedish band Bob Hund. Together we launched a new website for their agency, Rethink in Copenhagen. Working with Martin and his partner at Rethink, Kresten, was such a delight. Looking forward to the next time our paths will cross!

March

March was a month of change. I finally got to move into a new office at Media Evolution City. I liked my old office too but felt that I need a new environment to better stimulate me. As the offices were brand new, there were some initial hassles but nothing that was beyond what to expect and I must say that I think the team at Media Evolution have been very proactive in all discussions and eager to get feedback and improve things throughout the year.

I also got in touch with a brand new startup in the States that came to be my second biggest client of 2012. Until they launch, I can’t go into details about their product but I can say that I have never had a better client experience. Although we were in different time zones and 99% of our communications were through email, it was an effortless relationship. I’m hoping they will launch during early 2013 and I can give you more information about the different projects I’ve worked on.

April

April was a month of many small projects. I continued to work with the American startup, but was also lucky enough to get to work with Spotify and their desktop app – a groundbreaking product. I helped Hjaltelin&Stahl in Copenhagen with a project for one Denmark’s biggest telecoms with a cool 4G project and I did some minor design work for Soundrop, a company that my talented friend Daniel Källbom later came to be the Head of Design for.

On a personal note – I got to go to Liverpool together with my friend Zac for the first time to see my favorite team play

May – July

May was a month of new projects for IKEA and I got involved in no less than three different projects. Combined with work for the American startup, needless to say I had my hands full. The summer was spent working mainly on two of the projects for IKEA along with work for the American startup.

August

In August I was contacted by National Encyklopedin to update their digital visual identity based on the technical framework that had been developed by another agency. Once we started to fine tune things here and there, we noticed that in fact we wanted to change a lot in the framework as well.

As two of the projects for IKEA came to and end, the third picked up in full speed.

September

September was a month that combined National Encyklopedin, IKEA and the American Startup. All very different from each other in terms of the project and also in terms of organisations got me realising that one of things I love the most about my work is my chance to work with everything from a startup of one person – to a global company with more than 130.000 employees.

At the end of September I also helped out Malmö based startup Emues with a new visual identity that’s due to launch soon.

October

After working 150% for the entire spring & summer, I was in need of a more relaxed work pace in October and projects naturally started to finish off. During October I just worked a couple of days a week for IKEA and spent more and more time at home, taking walks with my dog, trying to work out and just meeting new people.

November

In November I started to work with the Finnish book publishing company Schildts & Söderströms helping them with a digital strategy on how to improve awareness for their writers and their books. It’s a bit of a new market for me but very interesting.

End of November also became a fairly intense IKEA-period with a lot of deadlines and sign-offs.

December

December was a big month as I won(* a pitch for Crunchfish, competing against some of the biggest and strongest advertising agencies in the region. Crunchfish develops a touchless integration for devices and I think the possibilities for this is endless. We are working on a strategy, a new visual identity and a new website.

I also got to the redesign for a great British company, Findababysitter.com. I worked directly with their inhouse design department and their founder Tom Harrow. The new design will launch after the New Year and is fully responsive.

The work for IKEA and Schildts & Sönderströms are continuing and moving along as planned.

* I won a part of the project – and am now working on the project together with another agency, my former landlord – ID Kommunikation.

Coming up

I will continue to work with IKEA, Schildts & Söderströms and Crunchfish for January (maybe February) and will also design the new website for Suzuki Cars in Switzerland.

“The 18 minute “Connecting” documentary is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry’s thought leaders. As the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is seen to be not only increasing in importance dramatically, but also expected to play a leading role in shaping the coming “Internet of things.” Ultimately, when the digital and physical worlds become one, humans along with technology are potentially on the path to becoming a “super organism” capable of influencing and enabling a broad spectrum of new behaviors in the world.”

Amazing stuff from Wilson Miner who was part of the design team that made apple.com, then moved on to work as Head of Design at Rdio and now at Facebook.

Their names maybe doesn’t tell you much but these guys do incredible work. And people who does incredible work AND seem down-to-earth cool guys – they are worth watching.

Clients are the difference between art and design. Clients can be the best part of the design process.

Very well put and Mike is a joy to watch. If you like what you see – I think you should buy his book, Design is a job and follow him on Twitter.

Here’s my latest mixlist of stuff I’m listening to right now while working. Enjoy.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely love Mr. Porter, the fashion e-tailor for men. I think that Wednesday London have done an outstanding job with the identity. It breathes exclusivity yet not up-tight, it’s modern and new but still has a very classic touch.

They have been awarded for their fantastic use of typography for their custom typeface, Mr.Porter Hand by Underware and their packaging is always well received.

However, I think as their main communication channel for new and existing customers is their website they could easily be improved. If you look at their identity closer, it’s really the physical things that have been giving the extra attention and love that makes their brand so special. But for pure digital things, things like buttons, scrollbars, thumbnails… It’s all very basic. In fact – it almost feels like the default mode.

I wanted to give it a quick take on what a little attention to the digital side of their identity could do. I’ve decided not to add any functionality nor to change the UX in any major way. I’ve also decided just to focus on the product page at this stage.

Here’s the original (click for full size):

• I think the price needs to be clearer and stand out more, no matter who your client is*, price will matter. (*to different extents but still)
• “Add to bag” which is one of the key elements on this page is surrounded by other stuff that doesn’t need as much attention. When you’re ready to buy, you should be able to do so without any hassle.
• Share buttons take  a lot of space and I’d like to see statistics on how much these are used. No one “likes” a single piece of clothing on Facebook, you like Mr.Porter. And if we’re gonna have share functionality on product level, you’re missing the most important feature for clothing which would be Svpply.

Here’s my quick redesign suggestion (again, click for full size)

• The background is now their signature color with white background on the product to make it stand out more.
• The important stuff – color, size and add to bag is more separated from the product description
• I’ve complemented Georgia with Proxima Nova. It makes the page more visually appealing and dynamic.

What do you think? Let me know by e-mail or comment on my Facebook-page!

“During the first week of September 2012, Edward Ocampo Gooding and Daniel Beauchamp went to Hyper Island’s Stockholm campus to teach a week on Open Data to DDS students. This is their story.”

Really like this list from Pitchfork; http://www.pitchfork.com/peopleslist/. Like the parallax scroll in the beginning, the way the list itself is presented and the visual information. But what I absolutely loved was Converse’s tagline: “Shoes buy a ticket – Sneakers put on the show”. It’s brilliant copywriting and perfect media planning.

Brilliant interview with Jason Fields on growing slowly.

“…only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors”

The biggest fear most of us have with learning to say NO is that we will miss an opportunity. An opportunity that would have catapulted us to success, or that will never come again. And most of the time*, that simply isn’t true.

I’ve found that the first part of learning to say NO is learning to accept that offers and opportunities are merely an indication that you’re on the right path- not that you’ve arrived at a final destination you can never find again.

If someone is choosing YOU, it means you’re doing something right. And that is the biggest opportunity you can receive- the chance to recognize that your hard work is paying off. And if you continue to do good work, those opportunities will continue – and improve- over time.

Not only is he very talented on digital and everything related to the web, he’s also a great guy to work with.

Anton has a strong hands-on grasp and understands the new world of comm. better than any creative I’ve met.

Working with Anton means that you can be sure that you’ll be able to deliver to the client with quality and on time.

He is also one of the most well-oriented online-art directors I ever had the pleasure of working with.

Anton is a great colleague – relaxed and fun to be around, whilst maintaining the drive and focus required.

Anton took direction very well and provided input and expertise far beyond what we had expected.

Love this!

Oceania: blue. Europe: black. Americas: red. Africa: yellow. Asia: green.

Love this initiative of GreaterGoodStudio. A kickstarter project that seeks inspiration and commitment (and well.. money) from users helping to build the best transit app for Chicago.

He’s a great resource on both art direction and strategy. He is very creative and has a sense of detail that really stands out.

From research to strategy and creative execution Anton delivers great work on a constant basis.

Once the work was under way, we realized Anton is extremely creative with high standard for what he produces.

Interested to see what will become of Animography.

Do read Tobias van Schneider’s take on what e-mail clients today are lacking – structure. It’s a very refreshing take on what’s wrong with e-mail today and why the system could be improved so much. Would love if Apple were to assign some of these features in an upcoming version of Mail.app.

Follow an email from ‘Send’ to ‘New e-mail’.

Have you tried OLO for iOS? Looks beautiful.

I think it’s weird that Ford is the sender behind this but like the fact that Ogilvy Paris seem to be doing more digital and innovating stuff. Dying to see if this works as well as you would hope it does.

Hyper Island finally redesigned their site and the result looks great from what I’ve seen so far. Great work everyone involved!

So proud over a lot of my friends who have helped build B-reel to the masterpiece it is today. Here they are covered in Inc. magazine.

This has been going around a lot lately so most of you have probably seen it already but if not, here it is – Pixar’s guide to storytelling.

Highlights:
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

A lengthy but insightful post on how Palm managed to go from the darling of CES 2009 to a forgotten company that noone remembers in 31 months.

People who work with me know that one of the things I love most about freelancing is that I can’t stand agency meetings with 20 people that lasts for hours without an agenda and therefor resulting in; nothing.

FastCoDesign have an excellent article on how meetings are handled at Apple. Do read it. It’s an excellent example of what I think a lot of companies fail at with meetings. It’s as if they are so afraid of excluding anyone from a meeting, they invite anyone they can think of might have anything remotely to do with the project.

“One particular day, there appeared in our midst a woman from Apple with whom I was unfamiliar. I don’t recall her name, as she never appeared in our world again, so for the purposes of this tale, I’ll call her Lorrie. She took her seat with the rest of us as Steve breezed into the boardroom, right on time. Steve was in a sociable mood, so we chatted it up for a few minutes, and then the meeting began. “Before we start, let me just update you on a few things,” said Steve, his eyes surveying the room. “First off, let’s talk about iMac–” He stopped cold. His eyes locked on to the one thing in the room that didn’t look right. Pointing to Lorrie, he said, “Who are you?”

Lorrie was a bit stunned to be called out like that, but she calmly explained that she’d been asked to attend because she was involved with some of the marketing projects we’d be discussing. Steve heard it. Processed it. Then he hit her with the Simple Stick. “I don’t think we need you in this meeting, Lorrie. Thanks,” he said. Then, as if that diversion had never occurred–and as if Lorrie never existed–he continued with his update. So, just as the meeting started, in front of eight or so people whom Steve did want to see at the table, poor Lorrie had to pack up her belongings, rise from her chair, and take the long walk across the room toward the door. Her crime: She had nothing to add.”

Just a short Friday-update on what I’ve been working on for the past months. I’ve had the opportunity to work on some great projects and while I unfortunately can’t share that much at this stage, here’s a teaser:

• Rethink – a Danish advertisement agency
• A Palo Alto based startup – creating a killer service
• Hjaltelin, Stahl & Co – Electric Rainmaker – a Danish full service agency
• Spotify – the world’s best music service.

Have a great weekend everybody!

This is insanely good. Do watch.

When forming your business, you’re constantly being forced to make decisions on what kind of company you want to build. I think this is something you’ll have to do regardless if you have 10 or 1000 employees – or if you’re like me – self employed. Here are some basic rules that I try to adapt when forming my company culture.

1. Sometimes who you do business with is more important than the business you’re doing

I am in a business where co-operation is key to any success of a project. So if I’m in a position to choose people to work with that I truly enjoy working with, can learn from, and just enjoy being around – this is a good thing. Sometimes you’ll get hung up on making as much revenue as possible that you stop loving your work. If you find people you enjoy hanging out with and you love what you do – success will come.

2. The work you deliver is more important than where you’re doing the work

I meet with a lot of agencies. Some of them feel very strongly about the physical position where the work should be done. I agree that certain parts of a project are easier to handle on location but I think we are still too focused on the idea that work is something that we’re doing at a desk, in an office. Some of the best work I’ve done have been for companies thousands of miles away. With good communication, an open mind and a “can do” spirit – you’ll get great work. Since I started, about 75% of my client list are clients not based in the south of Sweden.

3. Being small gives me an advantage, let’s use it.

I’m just one guy. Occasionally my wife works with me, but usually it’s just me (and my dog). What I do have – is an amazing network of friends, old colleagues, partners, former and current Hyper Island students to help me out with any project that might come up. This gives me an amazing flexibility in choosing projects and still delivering quality work.

This deck provided by Business Insider provides some highly interesting insights into where we stand with mobile and what the future looks like. It’s 50 slides, but it’s very to-the-point and provides some amazing insights.

“For the conference this year, the TED curators approached me about staging something unexpected to surprise their audience. We had previously staged a musical prank at a conference, but I wanted to do something new and different for TED. I came up with the idea to have a fake speaker give a talk and make it seem like his big moment in the spotlight had been ruined by a computer crash. Apple users love to hate the notorious Spinning Beach Ball of Death. I started with that image and set out to heighten it to absurdity.”

I would like if this were to happen the next time a presentation crashes.

An idea is not a design,
but it is an invitation to a journey.

A design is not a prototype,
but it is a plan for moving forward.

A prototype is not a program,
but it is a test for your assumptions.

A program is not a product,
but it is a milestone towards progress.

A product is not a business,
but it is the first fruit of an idea.

A business is not profits,
but it is a team behind your back.

Profits is not an exit,
but it is validation of your work.

And an exit is not happiness,
but happiness is not a destination.

Happiness is a journey.

Many people wonder what it is that I do for Hyper Island as I’m not actually lecturing that much. For the first 5 weeks of 2012, I was the module leader students studying Digital Media in Karlskrona for their “Branding & Visual Design” module. It all began back in the summer of 2011 when I was part of a small group of industry professionals who studied the entire Digital Media course for 2012 and discussed wether or not modules needed to be updated or adapted to current market conditions.

I was then appointed to lead this module which basically includes planning and running the entire module with the help from Hyper Island staff. In order to manage I needed to have a person running the module in Stockholm as introductions and presentations take place on the same dates in both Stockholm and Karlskrona. I reached out to one of the lecturers I had back in 2000 when I studied at Hyper Island, who I always been inspired by, Patrick Sundqvist (now Creative Director of Perfect Fools).

We then started to build up the module with all the essentials that we felt were needed to give the students a complete overview of what it takes to build a brand and to visualise an identity.

The module started with an introduction lecture on the history of branding and how branding is something that’s always been part of our society, wether it’s people marking their possessions (or themselves), burnmarking cattle, or as we know it today – logotypes and visual identities.

1. Design Reserach
One aspect of branding I feel that is essential is research and to have good tools for conducting an understandable research. Söderhavet came and gave an excellent lecture on research that included both personal tips, valuable tools as well as case studies.

2. The Design Process
After this I knew that the students will be eager to get started! So we need a visual genius that have experience and talent, that can showcase great stuff and explain how he goes about actually creating his designs and what his process for doing such is. I turned to my friend and amazing designer, Pelle Martin who came and gave a highly appreciated speech.

3. Logotype development
So far the lectures have been focused on digital and the people giving them have been digital professionals. In order to give them a more nuanced picture of brands and development I invited design agency Kurppa Hosk to come and lecture and do a small workshop with the students.

4. Building a brand
Finally I wanted the students to understand that in today’s fast moving society, a brand is something much more than just the visual identity. Through a friend I got in touch with Global Marketing Manager of Spotify, Sophia Bendtz, who of course was the perfect person to give such a lecture. I am forever grateful for her flying in from the States to talk to the students as I know how much it meant to them.

Apart from the planning, all the arrangements and schedules to match I was at Hyper Island for a follow up sessions during “half time” to see how the students were doing.

Finally I came back together with two other advertising professionals for their final presentations. Although I’ve been working with Hyper Island for the past 5 years on smaller and larger modules, I am still amazed at the quality the work the students achieve in such a limited amount of time. DM13 in Karlskrona – you have a bright future ahead of you!

I’ve been spending this week at Hyper Island in Stockholm for a Master Class. It’s a great experience regardless of your digital savvyness aimed at marketing and advertising professionals that need to strengthen their digital skills and understanding.

I had a session on Day 2 where I started with sparking the participants with some inspiration cases before firing up a workshop; Working with ideas. In just 45 minutes they came up with some amazing ideas on how to reach users through digital for a given brand.

For a better idea of the discussions that are taking place, follow and engage in the #himc backchannel on twitter.

A few days ago we launched an update to our website. From a design/esthetics point of view, the update may seem minimal and just some updated typography and colors. However, one thing that we always argue is that design is something much more than just the looks of something. It’s just as much (if not more) – how it works. How it adapts to your environment.

Our new website is fully responsive which basically means that it will look beautiful regardless if you access it on a mobile phone, a smart phone, a tablet or a 27 inch desktop.

When you’re designing a new site it’s of great essence to know your visitors. One way of getting to know your visitors is of course Google Analytics where we can find out more about their screen resolution, platform, network etc.

When we looked into our visitors we found that:

So the decision to make our new website responsive was fairly easy as we always preach that we need to design for our customers and not ourselves.

Amazing graphics over Paris vs. New York.

“Working overtime doesn’t increase your output. It makes you stupid.”

Last week I was responsible for the design specialization at Hyper Island. The 4-day course’s aim was to give all of the students at Digital Media 13 a basic understanding of what design is and how we can work with it.

We started the course with a very basic introduction to design and how to go about when solving problems. The introduction focused on the most important part of the design process: identifying the problem that we are trying to solve.

The students were then given an assignment to redesign something related to Apple, but were free to choose wether it be iTunes, iOS, the dock in OSX, physical products or even the visual identity.One of the most common questions I received afterwards was why we had chosen Apple as a brand. Our idea behind this was:

1. - as we had very limited of time we needed to choose a brand that the students already had some sort of relationship with. Regardless if they are Android or iOS users, PC or Mac, it’s safe to say that all of them have a relationship to Apple in one way or another.

• - Apple is somewhat considered as a brand that’s, by many, seen as “perfect”. However, when you do a good research and analysis, you’ll find that there are many small parts in the big machine that could be improved (through design, usability, etc).

The fantastic thing with the presentations was that although there was nearly 50 students, there was at least 40 different design suggestions for improvements. I saw a great redesign of Game Center, an amazing Notes/Reminders app, a great iTunes, a motion sensitive remote as well as a great improvement to AutoCorrect.

I’m really looking forward to coming back to Hyper Island in December to continue working with their great students!

In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.

If I had money and a new cool app/service – I would hire Adam Lisagor to make my commercial.

When you have some extra time, do read Vinh Khoi’s post on “End of Client services” and then the response from Full Stop Interactive. It’s a great discussion on design and client services.

As summer is coming to it’s end, we are faced with a new season and I’m meeting more agencies for possible assignments. If you are in need of a freelancing Creative Director / Art Director, get in touch. Here’s what I think gives me an edge in comparison to competitors.

1. Advertising & Digital background
I have solid experience from the digital world and have been awarded with Cresta Award and Guldägget. I also have experience from both Bates Y&R and BBDO. I know how to incorporate a strong concept in both the digital and traditional marketing world. Naturally, I am also confident in presenting and speaking in front of clients.

2. Business minded with a design background
I have spent most of my active work life working as an Art Director and Creative Director so I have a strong background within design. The last three years I have spent as a small business owner and studying Business Management. Pål Katsler, former Account Director at Bates Y&R in his testimonial:
“Anton is a very talented creator and also a person that I have enjoyed working with immensely. A definitive strength of his is that his creative solutions are also valid from a commercial point-of-view without losing creative edge. Working with Anton means that, as a Project Manager, you can always be sure that you will be able to deliver to the client with quality and on time.”

3. I keep myself up to date by helping tomorrow’s future
Since 2005 I have been involved in teaching & managing students at Hyper Island. Although it sometimes means I give lectures, it often means that I listen to students. If I can’t listen to their problems and understand their point of view, I will not be able to guide them.

“If You’re Not Making Mistakes, then You’re Not Doing Anything.”

One of my favorite magazine’s have turned out to be Inc. It’s a fantastic business magazine that focuses on what makes businesses “work” – in all aspects.

Here are a few of my favorite articles from the latest issue:
The way I work, David Karp of Tumblr

“As a kid, David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, taught himself to code and dropped out of high school. Now 24 years old, Karp runs his company his way—and refuses to keep a schedule.”

Best Business Travel 2011 – altough I don’t travel frequently in business, I love traveling and love “comfort”.

Don’t exaggerate your size – Jason Fried covers the same topic as my latest blog post.

As you might have noticed during the week some bits and pieces have changed on this site. The biggest change is that every ‘we’ is changed for an ‘I’. When I started Le Petit Garcon more than two years ago I had an idea of building a digital design studio with many employees. Occasionally, there have been employees in various forms; Andreas did some very good programming work for us and these days my wife is also helping me out with admin-stuff.

The other day I read something in ReWork (business book from 37Signals) that caught my attention:
 

Why grow?
People ask, “How big is your company?” It’s small talk, but they’re not looking for a small answer. The bigger the number, the more impressive, professional, and powerful you sound. “Wow, nice!” they’ll say if you have a hundred-plus employees. If you’re small, you’ll get an “Oh… that’s nice.” The former is meant as a compliment; the latter is said just to be polite.
….
Do we look at Harvard or Oxford and say, “If they’d only expand and branch out and hire thousands more professors and go global and open other campuses all over the world.. then they’d be great schools.” Of course not. That’s now how we measure the value of these institutions. So why is it the way we measure businesses?
Maybe the right size for your company is five people. Maybe it’s forty. Maybe it’s two hundred. Or maybe it’s just you and a laptop.
….
Don’t be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that’s sustainable and profitable, whether it’s big or small, should be proud.”

Maybe it’s just you and a laptop. I realise that I have been working so hard to give the illusion that Le Petit Garcon is something much bigger because I thought that would make it look more professional and successful, instead of cherishing the fact that Le Petit Garcon is a great company providing good design solutions for it’s clients. Today it’s just me and that’s amazing.

A selection of videos that we really enjoyed the last month:

Google Chrome: It get’s better

Pampers: For every little miracle

Business Week: The movie sort of (via danielkjellsson.com)

Hyper Island on a wall (animations by Claudio Salas)

We had some issues earlier today with tweets and facebook links being posted when we we’re migrating content to our new WordPress-site. Sorry for that.

Anyway – here it is, our new website! We’re really happy about it, and we’re happy for completing our first project with Vuzum who did a great job on programming everything!

We’re still tweaking bits and pieces so be patient and please let us know of any errors!

We’re very happy to tell that we’ve recently have three new clients that we are working with.

We are currently working on a small campaign for ELLE magazine for their four Nordic markets. As we have a keen interest in fashion, this is extremely satisfying.

We have just delivered a design proposal for one of Danish superagency In2Media’s clients. More on this when it’s released.

Thorskogs Slott is a fantastic castle on the Swedish west coast. We have delivered a new folder for their wedding season 2012.

If you look through our Work-section, one might think that we’ve run out of things to do. The last month however, have been far from relaxing. Without going into detail, here’s what we’ve been up to:

• We’ve designed and produced an iPhone/iPad application aimed at kids aged 2-4 years. More on this when it’s approved and released.
• We are working with our neighbors Eminent on a spec project.
• We are also working with Good Old – but not with design. Anton is in charge of account management for a design oriented project.
• We’ve helped Fjord with visual design on an amazing task; the future of advertising for one of their clients.

More on all of this later on, this was just a quick update!

…and Le Petit Chien is still asleep.

We hope all of you have had an amazing holiday. We were back in business last week but with a slow start, from today it’s full speed ahead!

In order to keep us more organized internally, with clients and with collaborators – Tina is now here to manage our bigger projects and organize our schedules (and occasionally help out with design work).

Stay posted for more updates on our latest projects…

This post over at Mashable, was an interesting take on iPad magazines and in particular, their sales. While the common belief have been that digital sales are going down, charts show that they actually follow the printed version fairly well. I guess this proves that regardless of media, content is what sells.

http://mashable.com/2010/12/29/ipad-magazine-sales-decline/

In the last general election in Sweden, a right-wing party named SverigeDemokraterna polled 5.70% and won twenty parliamentary seats. There was a lot of discussion about this as it was the first time a party that’s openly against immigration was part of parliamentary.

Skåne, and Malmö in particular, is often referred to as the home of these views although Malmö have one of the highest percentage of immigration. To work actively against a change, our office neighbours Good Old, called for a workshop. People from the creative communication agencies (Eight, Navigator, ID Kommunikation, Good Old and Le Petit Garcon) in Malmö together with people from the media (Sydsvenskan) as well as the city of Malmö and Malmö University gathered to address the situation.

Today was just the first step but I think it was an amazing initiative by Good Old and it’s what’s needed by us to make sure that we will see a positive change in the 2014 general elections.

I had the pleasure of working with Daniel Sandström (editor in chief at Sydsvenskan), Klas Tjebbes (from Eight and on the board of FC Rosengård), Nicklas Bergenblad (Navigator) and Jonathan Fried (Fokus).

It’s only been a month since we got our iPad and we’re still browsing, analyzing, testing, playing with all the the different applications available. Many predict that the iPad will be the newspaper’s proceeder. So far – it seems there is no given format for what a magazine on the iPad is – or should be. Which in a way is nice and challenging but also leave room for a lot of “interactive” magazines, that basically just a fancy PDF.

So far our favorites include:

Esquire

Times Eureka

And although I think the pricing models seem a bit off, I’m looking forward to trying out News+

Swedish agency Daytona have released a very research about how Swedes use their iPads and what we are expecting from it.

Unfortunately for some of you, it’s only in Swedish. Men ni andra kan läsa vidare här.

Regarding the fact that we still talk about new media:

“… But whether you call it new media, digital, interactive or clicky-clicky-magic, the reality is it continues to morph and change the world around it faster and with more impact than almost anything else in history.”

Please read all of it here

Patrick Gardner from Perfect Fools sums up brilliantly what makes Sweden so successful in digital advertising. Heja Sverige!

Read more:
When Sweden Rules the World

“…the minute you think you know, the minute you go – oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel – you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead. You’re not stupid anymore, you are fucking dead.”

Key findings in “Effectiveness by Design” initated by the Association of Dutch Designers.

“The financial performance of a new product is on average 20% higher when both experience design (stimulates the senses, increases self expression and summons emotion) and functional design (focused on technology, functionality and ergonomics) have received a lot of attention, compared to products where there was an average attention for these design aspects.”

“The success of a new product increases when there is a lot of attention for design during the development process and when designers are involved.”

“Involving designers during the development of a new website or house style for an organisation, strengthens the image of that organisation in areas such as social responsibility, emotional likability, financial success and good employership.”

“The research shows that several positive design effects are stronger, when designers are given more freedom to explore ideas outside the scope of a project.”

“The innovation of design in the areas of experience and functionality has a positive effect on the quality of the product.”

Starting September 1:st we have Andreas Climent on board who is a talented XHTML/CSS/PHP-developer. With Andreas on the team, we will be able to give our clients even better solutions and more advanced features and customizations of WordPress.

We’ve already completed some initial projects and feel very pleased with having Andreas on board.  

PS. Andreas is also working on his solo project, Flickrista – best fashion photography found on Flickr.

I’ve never really understood why I would like an iPad (or similar) for reading purposes. When I’m in a reading mood – I’d like all technology to be absent. That is of course, unless you question what “reading” is and could mean. Excellent work by IDEO.

We’ve previously highlighted them for their “Future of Self-Service Banking” which you can find here: http://vimeo.com/14939329

Although we are unable to show you any of the work we have done for FJORD, it seems that they are happy with it. Here’s what their Creative Recruiter, Jamie Collinsworth had to say:

“We hired Anton for some freelance design work at Fjord and were thrilled with the results. Not only was he very responsive during the project briefing and negotiation process, he also was very flexible to our demanding project start time and schedule. Once the work was under way, we realized Anton is extremely creative with a high-standard for what he produces. His design aesthetic is quite sophisticated and it’s obvious he sincerely cares about going the extra mile for his clients. We look forward to collaborating with Anton again in the future!”

Thank you – and looking forward to working with you soon again!

We found this amazing keynote on Slideshare, called 10 things CEO’s need to know about design. It’s well worth a read through but the slide above says everything we stand for and believe in.

We’ve finally took time to update our own site with a cleaner design. There are still tweaks that needs to be done here and there but all in all I think we’re getting there. Please tweet us comments!

Lately we’ve been helping our neighbours, ID Kommunikation with an online strategy for their client SIGMA. After sharing office space for 6 months it’s been a delight to finally work together. They are such a nice group of talented people and I hope we’ll work together soon again.

Some of the work we do is pure strategy & concept. Which is nice but it’s difficult to show in our portfolio. It’s sometimes under NDA’s and it’s almost always difficult to explain in a short sentance.

Lately we’ve been helping Finnish e-shop Dermoshop reaching out to Swedes. We’ve helped their agency, Mios, with a strategy that heavily involves the participation of bloggers. Since the project rolled out Dermoshop’s referral traffic have increased by more than 400% – a direct result by our online strategy. As a bonus, this also increases Dermoshops page rank on search engines.

This is absolutely one of our favorite TEDsters (and graphic designers). We especially love his way of splitting up retirement and adding a year into your work life every seventh year. This is valuable for anyone.

If you haven’t seen it yet – we highly recommend you to. Even if you’re not interested in typography, Helvetica is a true typeface classic that you are exposed to everywhere in daily life.

If you are in Sweden, you can watch it at SVT Play for free until May 22:nd. http://svtplay.se/v/1972875/dokumentarfilm/helvetica

Mobile Heights is a mobile communications cluster initiative in Southern Sweden. It brings together world-class organizations from the industry and academia as well as institutions from the public sector.

As of last week Mobile Heights is now a client of Le Petit Garcon. We will help them with marketing material both online and offline. We’re very excited and will start working with Mobile Heights straight away!

This is the view from our office window today. Less than a month ago everything was covered in snow and ice.

This is the best part of a job description we’ve ever seen.

I am sure that most people visiting our blog are familiar with TEDTalks. For digital advertisers like myself, it’s a great place to find talks by some legendary speakers like Rory Sutherland, Stefan Sagmeister, Tim Brown and so on.

However, I was truly moved by this talk performed by none other than the British TV-chef, Jamie Oliver. He delivers it with passion and it’s a joy to watch.

Wow… We’ve been really bad at updating this blog.

Hopefully – we’ll soon be able to post updates on some projects that we’ve been working on. But for now we’ll give you this presentation that we were supposed to give at Hyper Island Master Class today. The session turned out to something else but I think it was a great day and I always enjoy coming back to Hyper Island.

We are now back from X-mas & New Years holidays – looking forward to what 2010 will bring! We’ll be in Los Angeles / West Hollywood area between January 18:th -25:th if you’d like to meet us feel free to get in touch!

We’ve been watching ‘Objectified’. Amazing movie, it’s a must for everyone in design.

Here’s the trailer:

We’re sending out our first client appraisal. Wish us luck.