Team North Kingdom excitedly waits for the board to be turned on for testing
(Sorry, this is the longest Behind The Scenes post ever!) Despite the short timeline on this project, it had many moving parts – we worked across four countries and many more cities, with technology we hadn’t used before, and with 27 team members on the project at its peak. Looking back it is quite amazing how far we traveled in such a short time. We had never done an interactive billboard before, but if you’re going to do one you might as well do one in Times Square right?
Y&R New York came to us to help them build a “good news” billboard in Times Square, with a digital character to help spread that good news. Inspired by the idea of an “alive” character, our design director remembered a creature called Gorg, created for a Swedish snowboard company several years ago (that’s Gorg in the sketch below). We started to think about how a textured creature like that might work in Times Square, and how he might interact with people rather than just broadcast news.
…And so Gil (that’s Life is Good backwards) was born.
We got a honorably assignment from Rob Ford this autumn to design FWA Award Certificates. The four certificates are SOTM (Site Of the Month, SOTY (Sity Of The Year), PC (People’s Choice) and SOTD (Site Of The Day). 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.
During the autumn we have been involved in setting up a master’s programme in interaction design and crossmedia together with the Department of Informatics at Umeå University.
We see a great need for understanding and creating platforms and content in a rapidly changing media landscape. The technical evolution creates a sea of endless possibilites and drives the need for talent that understands the importance of strategic thinking.
The master programme brings together the two areas of Cross Media and Interaction Design in order to provide a solid theoretical and practical framework for creating and understanding the future content of the digital media landscape. In close collaboration with industry, the programme prepares for the rapidly changing work practice of creating digital media content, or for a future in Cross Media Interaction Design research.
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.
Some of you might have seen it already – we tweeted about it at launch in December – but here comes Bounceball the blogpost.
Google asked us to create a game in HTML5 for the launch of the Chrome Webstore. So we set out to do a good looking and hopefully addictive platform game using the Chrome logotype as the ever bouncing main character.
From a technical perspective it was fun to see what we could do with the canvas element. Quite a bit it seems, even though it’s fair to say that we ran into some issues, especially the performance varied a lot between browsers. In this particular project that was sort of OK though, since one of the goals was to show how fast Google Chrome is.
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.
Renowned for their stunning digital production combining 3D, live action and brilliant art direction, the team create beautiful interactive communication as on projects such as ‘Get the Glass’, ‘Teamgeist’ for Adidas’ and Vodafone’s ‘FutureVision’.
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! So if you are in London this spring, come and join us and D&AD for a fun night.
