I’m proud and excited to announce my new job as Creative Director & Partner at Hello Monday. I will be heading up a bunch of amazingly creative people in Århus, New York and Copenhagen with focus on strengthening the already pretty impressive portfolio with more creative, conceptual and strategic design work.
The CPH office is in the making in central Copenhagen and will be opening 20.01.2010.
Stop by for a chat and a cup of delicious mojo.
View the Hello Monday portfolio here: www.hellomonday.com
Follow Hello Monday on twitter here: twitter.com/hellomondaycom
I was pleased to find out that the readers of the online media news channel MediaWatch just awarded Politiken.dk the most successful web relaunch of the year 2009.
Read about the award here.
Read the Politiken.dk redesign case here.
Just wanted to share some of the student work from a 2 week course in Online Editorial Design at the Danish School for Media and Journalism that I just finished. The students are attending the 3 year education in graphic design and my job is to teach them how to think and design for digital media. The assignment was to research, conceptualize and design a personal brand site for danish celebrity chef Nikolaj Kirk. The output was pretty great, so I decided to share a couple of them with you here.
Stine Engels Henriksen
Kristina Krogh Larsen
Thomas Bræstrup
Esben Ask Meincke
Just attended two days of new media inspiration at the yearly danish conference New Media Days. I’ve been to New Media Days the last couple of years and I really think it’s a great conference. What made this year different was, that me and Bjarke Myrthu from Storyplanet.com was invited to run one of the 4 workshop sessions. The title of the workshop was “Create online narratives” and was a session with a combination of four elements. First an introduction to online narratives, then an introduction to the different media types that make up the building blocks, an exercise in translating off line narratives to online media and in the end a case story to exemplify how it all comes together.
If you (understand Danish) you can read more about the session and watch the session here.
If you don’t understand Danish I can recommend this great talk by Clay Shirky on “Understanding the amateur producer”.
This evening I helped Marcos Chavez, owner of design agency TODA critique a class of design students from Parsons New School of Design. I critiqued it together with Andreas Anderskou (Project manager) and Ann Suvarnapunya (Graphic designer). The Idea was to do the session kind of “Project Runway” style and I think that worked out pretty good. At least the students sounded like they’d been getting some feedback that they could use.
The assignment brief was to: “Create a catalog that poses the question “Why are you here?” to the artist of your choice. The catalog should showcase the work of the artist while also telling the story of what the artist’s work is about.”
The work was, for the most part, really good and well made. Most of the students had a really high level of finish to their catalog dummy’s – something most danish students could learn from :-) It was fun to see the work of the American students compared to the once I teach i Denmark. Basically there wasn’t that much of a difference – maybe the student I’m used to teaching are a bit more conceptual in their approach, but then again these students where quite a bit younger than the danish once, so tath might have something to do with it.
Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of the actual student work to share with you.
Yesterday I went to a great AIGA event in the SVA Theater in New York. The event was honoring Richard Wildes 40 years of devoted work as chairman of the graphic design department at the School of Visual Arts. To do that, Steven Heller did live Q&As with legendary designers/design educators Gail Anderson, Arem Duplessis, Carin Goldberg, and Paula Scher. They where discussing their own careers in design education and showcasing some of their students results.
The design educators where talking about how important and rewarding it is to teach the next breed of young designers and had some really great examples of assignments and solutions with them.
One of the things that stuck to my mind, was Paula Scher talking about how she changed her perspective on design teaching a couple of years back. Going from giving assignments related to a specific media, i.e. book jacket design to now giving assignments that teaches the students how to seek out, research for and improve real life situations/businesses, utilizing the different medias that makes sense in the specific case – more of a holistic brand-oriented approach. I really like the idea and I think it’s much aligned with what we are trying to teach the kids at The Danish School of Media and Journalism. I really don’t think the world needs more “book jacket designers” – or designers stuck in a single narrow media.
Another thing Paula Scher said, that I think is very right, was a comment on the importance of getting good designers to embrace digital design (free from memory) “The Internet was invented by geeks – that’s why it looks like it does. But now that designers don’t fear technology any more, it’s time to take it back from the geeks and fix it. There’s no reason why a website can’t look as beautiful as a poster or a book jacket”. Sorry Paula, if I didn’t get it exactly right, but it was prety much the essence of it as I understood it. And it’s so true.
