At Hello Monday we are proud to be following up from last years success and happy to be able to call ourselves: Digital Agency Of the Year 2012. We’ve earned this titles by being the most awarded agency in the digital categories at the biggest award for creative communication in Denmark: Creative Circle Award. I want to thank all of our clients for inviting us in and for letting us do what we do best – making them kick ass on digital platforms!
Out of the 8 nominations in the digital categories, Hello Monday ended up with 2 Gold (LEGO: Life of George + B&O PLAY) and 2 Silver circles (Alka + Reebok.com). Also nominated (Copenhagen Art Festival, Fiona Walldesign, Cubo, Beanie & the Balloonist).
You can see all our nominated and awarded work from this year on this link.
Just returned from a short trip to Hamburg. I was invited to talk about our project for LEGO called Life of George at “This happened Hamburg“. This Happened is a great conference format with short talks and lots of time for questions from the audience. The subject for the talks are always centered around interaction design & technology. The event was perfectly organized by Michael Seifert, Frank Gruber and Markus Losleben and I had a really nice time both on and off the stage.
This November I was invited to speak at the internet conference “Internet is Sexy” in Bratislava. The conference featured speakers ranging from augmented reality to measuring digital campaign results. As most of the speakers where local, unfortunately I didn’t really understand that much, but the conference was very well organized by Ján Šifra and his team and it was a pleasure being there.
I did the talk “Have a passion, not a business plan” about the philosophy behind Hello Monday.
Yesterday I spoke at the KIKK digital festival in Namur, Belgium. The conference where extremely well organized and I would definitely recommend digital french-speaking people to go there if it’s back next year. My talk was called “Have a passion, not a business plan” and here’s how we describe it:
Is it possible to build an agency where you will actually enjoy coming to work every Monday morning — a playground rather than a production factory? That is what the founders of Hello Monday set out to do in 2006 when the agency was founded.
Jakob Kahlen, Creative Director and partner at Hello Monday, shares the ideology behind building and running an independent creative digital agency, and shows in depth case studies from some of the Hello Monday’s most colorful client projects.
A lot of other great digital speakers (and generally nice people :-) where there, including Ben Hammersly of Wired, Lab [AU], Lernert & Sander, Multitouch Barcelona, Andrew of Breakfast NY, Nico of Mixcloud, Filip of Creative Applications, Julien of Radio Laidback, Michael from Jung von Matt Next, and many more.
“On a perfect Monday the engine runs on passion, the deck is the playground, and the course is set towards great deadlines, good craftsmanship, skilled and friendly people, honesty, good food, mutual trust, and no fear. We sail between three offices in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and New York, but there is only one boat.”
Our NYC office is featured in this months Computer Arts. Hurry to the store to get the magazine or read the article online here.
Today we’re launching a new project for the brilliant people at LEGO. It’s called Life of George and it’s the world’s first interactive game combining real LEGO bricks with apps for your iPhone/iPod Touch. Follow George around the world as he challenges you to a series of fun building tasks. Build as fast as possible, capture your model with your iPhone/iPod camera and get scored on your building skills. Apart from the tasks George gives you, you can build and save your own models and challenge you friends to be the fastest & best builder in the two player mode.
Hello Monday did the design of the interface and the entire illustrative universe for the app and the game levels.
More George:
Download the app here: iTunes store
Buy the bricks here: LEGO Online Store (or any LEGO flagship store)
Hang with George on Facebook
Here’s a selection of some of the press that the launch got:
Techcrunch
Engadget
Wired
FAST Company
CBS News
Creativity Online
ZDNet
TIME
Extremely proud to be getting our first Cannes Cyber Lion silver award for the Google Demoslam project that we did for Google Creative Labs together with the New York based agency Johannes Leonardo. It’s a very special feeling to have your Cannes-virginity taken, especially sine I was actually at the ceremony witnessing it.
We were extremely happy and honored at Hello Monday when we got invited to speak at this years OFFF conference in Barcelona this summer! Even though non of us had actually attended the conference before, we knew that this is one of the biggest design conferences in the world and that we would be speaking on the side of some of our hero’s: Sagmeister, House Industries, Jon Burgerman, Julian Vallée, Unit9, and many other cool designers and design studios.
We’ve never been a big fan of the notorious “…and that we made this…”-talks showcasing portfolio work already accessible on designers websites, so we decided to take a different approach. We called our talk: “When you reach the crossroads – take it!”. We talked about 17. decision that shaped Hello Monday as an agency – a mix between our process, our ideology, clients we won, clients we lost, work we’re proud of and work we’re trying to forget. It was a great (although pretty time consuming!) process to dig down in the history of the company and it brought back both laughter and tears.
We decided to make OFFF the yearly company trip, so we brought all our colleges to Barcelona as well. Good times!
Hello Monday, the agency that I joined as partner one and a half years ago just got awarded Agency of the Year in Denmark at the yearly Creative Circle Award. A part from the Digital Agency of the Year Award, Hello Monday got 5 awards and Google won “Digital Client of the Year”. You can see the nominated and awarded projects and read more our Creative Circle here: www.creativecircle.dk
Needless to say I’m a very proud Creative Director today! I’m amazed by the quality and amount of work you can get out of a small agency, if it’s filled with the right (skilled, passionate, inventive and first and foremost good) people and is free from gutless clients and boring retainer work. If you’re reading this guys: I love you all! :-)
To infinity and beyond…
The danish agency news site Bureaubiz wrote a nice article on how Hello Monday is expanding.
· Read the article here (in Danish)
The Danish Paper on Marketing wrote a nice article on Hello Monday and the amount of awards we are nominated for at the moment.
The UK magazine Webdesign did a spread on our design for HAY calling it an “Uber-stylish furniture brochure”. I stumbled upon it by accident in Gatwick Airport on a trip to London.
The website for the amazing Danish Furniture company also won a FWA Site of the day recently.
Interview in the Danish marketing newspaper Markedsføring on my Cannes Jury appointment.
· Read it online (in Danish)
Today when visiting the Aarhus office I was perpetuated by Jeppe. Don’t really know if I should be flattered…
Today we got our official Foursquare “Check In Here” sticker at the Copenhagen office. Be sure to come around and see if you can wrest the Mayorship from one of the youngsters. Game on!
To have some good old analoge fun and to promote our Hello Monday Facebook page, we decided to have a Christmas give-away competition. Every week in December we had Hello Monday fans and followers tweet and comment on Mondays to enter the competition for nice handmade presents. We boosted our Facebook followers with almost 1.000 fans and got a lot of positive vibes from the Tweeps and Feeps (Facebook people?) out there. Take a look at some of the unique one-of-a-kind handmade gifts and be sure to befriend us on Facebook.
This is the time a year for awards, so here we go again… This Friday The Creative Circle Award was held at the VEGA Venue in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was nominated in 3 categories and the agency where I’m Creative Director, Hello Monday, was nominated for 2. It all turned out pretty good – here’s what we brought home with us:
Politiken.dk
Awarded Gold in Informational Websites
Folketinget.dk
Awarded Silver in Informational Websites
T2.tv
Awarded Silver in Branding Websites
Working Element
Awarded Bronze in Branding Websites
Well, the Webbys went well! At Hello Monday we got our second Webby the other day. This year we won the “Peoples voice Award” in the category Professional Services with our own site www.hellomonday.com and we’re very proud. See all the Webby Winners here.
This month I’m featured in Computer Arts Projects Design Dhallenge. The challenge was to design a blogish portfolio website for Orlando based designer and illustrator Joshua M. Smith. Further more I’m also a part of this month’s experts panel giving advice on how to build the perfect design portfolio. I strongly recommend that you go to your local magazine store to pick up an issue og CAProjects May issue :-)
» View my contribution to the challenge here
» Read more about Computer Arts Projects here
Yay! My agency Hello Monday is nominated for 3 webbys in two categories.
You can do us a big favor by casting your vote for us here:
· Best Home Page, T2 Vote Here:http://bit.ly/ardt3
· Best Home Page, Hello Monday Vote Here:http://bit.ly/ardt3A
· Professional Services, Hello Monday Vote Here: http://bit.ly/bKfFn9
I’m proud to be announcing 5 xshortlists for Creative Circle Award 2010. 3 projects which I’ve be personally involved in and 2 amazing Hello Monday projects.
The shortlisted projects I’ve been working on is:
· Folketinget.dk (The Danish Parliament) where my role was Creative Direction and concept development
· Albani.dk (Danish beer manufacturer) where my role was Art Direction and Concept Development
· Politiken.dk (Major Danish Newspaper) where my role was Art Direction and Concept Development
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
