We proudly announce that our project for the new Toyota Avalon was voted SOTD at FWA. The project was done together with Saatchi & Saatchi LA. Sit back, relax and enjoy the trip through 5 fabulous destinations in comfort and style. Welcome to Avalon Class!
http://www.thefwa.com/shortlist/welcome-to-avalon-class-
Do your own trip at: http://www.toyota.com/avalonclass
Together with our friends at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners we proudly present a raging food-fight spreading over the entire web. It’s Puffs against Crunchy, so choose your alliance and fight your way up to conquer your favorite site – or submit your own as a new battlefield.
Meet General Chester and enroll at www.battleofthecheetos.com
We had a good last week in Cannes as we picked up three Lions from Cyber categories.
One Silver for Swedish Armed Forces in category “Best Use of Video” and two Bronze Lions for Adidas Teamgeist in the categories “Animation” and “Graphic Design and Illustration”. Sweet end to a good award season overall.
This years summit turned out to be just as good as we all hoped, with great speakers, great mix of people and even good weather.
Amongst many nice sessions, there were a few things that particularly caught my mind such as:
Brian Solis fantastic insight into social media/strategy, Lego´s perfect positioning as “love brand”, Teenage Engineerings ability to allow the individual creative freedom and at the same time work tight as team.
But again, there were so much other interesting stuff also to make this such a great event with a broad range of people and speakers with different perspectives and backgrounds. We are already now starting to look forward to next years Creative Summit.
We have picked up quite a few awards recently and this weekend we were awarded a Gold World Medal in New York Festivals for the adidas teamgeist work in the category Entertainment/Promotion. We were also lucky to get plenty of shiny silver pencils from OneShow Interactive for adidas, GE Smartgrid (also won a bronze) and Swedish Armed Forces.
In D&AD, adidas were one amongst very few to get short-listed, but no pencil this time. However, at Clio, adidas project got bronze.
It feels like we should have a good chance of picking up something from Cannes next week, in particular with this new “Craft” category they´ve added. Soon we will know.
We are only a couple of weeks away from one of the highlights of the year, up here in the north. Creative Summit which runs between June 16-18 in Skellefteå. Our entire crew will meet up during the three days for inspiration and fun. Last year, the event was super inspiring, and this years delegates and speaker mix looks like another given success. For more details on the event, check out the site at www.creativesummit.se. Hope to see you there!!
Last week David Eriksson (CD/CEO) and myself came back from Toronto and FITC 2010. North Kingdom where invited by Shawn Pucknell to speak at this, in my eyes, very professional managed conference with nice variation of speakers. FITC is an event for the design and technology community, which is now held for the 9th year. I where in Toronto and spoke back in 2007 and was already then very impressed by the arrangement at Hilton Hotel. This year’s theme was Playground. ”Which is all about…playing!”
All photos here below is taken from FITC’s photostream on Flickr
During Saturday, the day before everything started, FITC had a ‘Get a Job’ day where we spoke about how to apply and what you as a student should think about. If you are a designer it is pretty much about portfolio, portfolio and portfolio, and that you can work in a team, which is just as important.
We also participated in a couple of panels. I joined a pretty interesting panel called ”From Solo to CEO – Managing Growth” together with Hoss Gifford, Paul Pattison, Grant Skinner and R Blank.
“What happens when somebody goes from being a solo developer/designer into the owner or leader of their own studio?”
I talked mostly about how hard it is to keep up the quality when you are growing and how you have to focus on what you are best at instead having lots of different roles and trying to be all over the place. Also you have to let things go… which can be very difficult sometimes. David joined a panel called “Playing for Keeps in a Global Digital Playground”.
Our talk was going to be the last of Day 1. We called our presentation “To live in North Kingdom” because we were going to talk about how we work and think in our everyday work. We took them through the development of North Kingdom Showreel and our digital campaign for Adidas Germany; Teamgeist.
Daniel Illics (CD North Kingdom) father in Borås have now made our fireplace. What are left now are some final touches on the surface layer and to fix the faked fire so it looks good. More to come…
Photos by Daniel Illic (on iPhone).
This is cool! For the second time the last three years, we are on the 2010 Creative 50 list. It’s a list where Ad Age and Creativity celebrate the year’s most inspiring thinkers and innovators.
“Welcome to the fifth annual Creativity 50. Each year, we cite those people and companies that made the biggest impact across all areas of creative culture. There are advertising and marketing people on the list. There are also tech pioneers, designers, directors, entrepreneurs, and others who challenged the established way of doing things and inspired with their action.”
Read the whole article here: creativity-online.com
Creativity writes about North Kingdom;
“From GE’s Smart Grid augmented-reality site with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, to Adidas Teamgeist for the German sports brand, North Kingdom has built a Swedish digital-production agency with work that can translate to any culture, anywhere in the world… The agency actually likes the challenge of working with shops in other time zones and thinks its northern location, away from the creative hotbeds of Amsterdam and New York, means its designers and developers can concentrate on one project at time, since “every single pixel needs love.”
I’m not so fond that they only have the co-founders presented thou, when it is an award for the whole team; from Gothenburg, through Klaverström and Stockholm up to Skellefteå.
However, keep up the good work folks, it’s the third time that is the hardest ;)
Cool also to see Lady Gaga on the same list! She is doing some crazy stuff out there! However, I would rather do a project with her then be on the same list… :)
TOP 50 Creative People
(These are not presented in any specific rank order)
Roger Stighall, Robert Lindstrom, David Eriksson, Co-founders, North Kingdom
Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan, Founders, Posterous
Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Architect, Microsoft Live Labs
Craig Allen, Art Director, and Eric Kallman, Copywriter, Wieden and Kennedy Portland
Karin Dreijer Andersson (aka Fever Ray), Musical Artist
Marco Arment, Lead Developer, Tumblr; Creator, Instapaper
Kathryn Bigelow, Director
Neill Blomkamp, Director, RSA
Alex Bogusky, Chief Creative Insurgent, MDC
James Cameron, Director
Roy Choi, Mark Manguera, Founders, Kogi
Damon Collins, ECD RKCR/Y&R
Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvedurai, Co-founders, Foursquare
Andreas Dahlqvist, ECD DDB Stockholm
Bart Decrem, CEO Tapulous
David Droga, Founder, Creative Chairman, Droga5
Dave Eggers, Author, Founder, McSweeney’s
Daniel Ek, Co-founder/CEO, Spotify
James Farley, Group VP Global Marketing, Ford
Cindy Gallop, Entrepreneur, Founder IfWeRanTheWorld.com
Lady Gaga, Musical Artist
Christian Haas, Creative Director/Associate Partner, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
James Hilton, Co-founder/CCO and Rei Inamoto CCO, AKQA
Damon Horowitz, Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, Aardvark
Mike Hughes, President, Martin Agency
Jonathan Ive, Senior VP Industrial Design, Apple
Jan Jacobs and Leo Premutico, Co-founders, Creative Directors, Johannes Leonardo
Matt Jones, Director of Design, Berg
Spike Jonze, Director, MJZ
Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom, co-founders/CCOs, Mother New York
Ashton Kutcher, Founder, Katalyst Media
Tom Kuntz, Director, MJZ
Michael Lebowitz, Founder/CEO, Big Spaceship
Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, Co-Founders, Opening Ceremony
Pranav Mistry, PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab
Ty Montague, Co-president, CCO North America, JWT
Tor Myhren, CCO, Grey New York
Filip Nilsson, Creative Director/Chairman, Forsman & Bodenfors
David “Nobby” Nobay, Creative Chairman, Droga5 Sydney
Rob Reilly, Andrew Keller, Jeff Benjamin, ECDs, Crispin Porter Bogusky
Eric Rodenbeck, Founder/Creative Director, Stamen Design
Vivian Rosenthal, Jesse Seppi, Co-founders/Designers/Directors, Tronic
Matt Ross, Creative Director; Matt Oxley, Head of Tech, Tribal DDB London
Keith Schofield, Director, Caviar/El Nino
KR Sridhar, CEO, Bloom Energy
Matthew Szymczyk, Hans Forsman, Creative Directors, Zugara
Iain Tait, Global Interactive ECD, Wieden and Kennedy
Andrey Ternovskiy, Founder of Chatroulette
Ray Tintori, Director, Partizan
Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO, CCO, Smule
NKitchen_2010-04-15 from Riccardo Tagliabue on Vimeo.
I spent the last period studying at Hyper Island here in Sweden, it was an intense year during which I worked with crazy mates from all over the world.
One of the most important thing that I’ve learned is the importance of the teamwork and how a consolidation of a methodology in working based on people is important. It’s also quite amazing how this reflects to a relaxed and respectful working environment.
For my internship I was searching for a company that was reflecting this kind of values. and here I’m, today is one month at North Kingdom Stockholm. During that time I had also the opportunity to meet the people of the Skalleftea Office. Was a great two days event where we partied and shared with everybody our last work experiences. We’re evaluating the different phases of the process and interesting stories came out…
The video is an excerpt of the Team days spent together. Was documenting this because I found interesting that instead of going to a “common” restaurant and ordering someone elses prepared food, we were the chefs of ourselves.
It comes clear to you how here the individual development as a person is important, everybody is a part of an engine, well oiled with a family-feeling atmosphere.
— Riccardo Tagliabue, Hyper Island Interactive Art Director -10
