http://www.thefwa.com/shortlist/welcome-to-avalon-class-

Do your own trip at: http://www.toyota.com/avalonclass

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.

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.

The audience was over 1000, so it felt really great that we had prepared our material well. The worse I know is to get up on stage and not being enough prepared. I mean, people have paid to hear us, so the least we can do is to prepare I think :)
After our talk, when we caught up on twitter, it seemed as people liked our presentation which made us very happy. Most interesting seems to been our showreel, how we handled weak deliveries in the Adidas project and our F.U.C.K. rule (Function, Usability, Cosmetica and Kärlek (Kärlek means Love in Swedish)).

Here is a short summary of our presentation by Dominic Gelineau for Applied Arts Wired;

“It is pretty nice when you get to learn how a renown agency like North Kingdom (@NorthKingdom) is working. I had seen this presentation 2 years ago and they did a good job to give new content by presenting a new project Adidas Teamgeist. They walked us through the production of this project that was heavy on video, illustration and 3D.
What I got out of this is the extreme importance they give to storytelling and to detail. A story seem to be at the heart of everything they do be it the showreel or a client project. As for being anal for details it is hard to get further than these guys, but it shows up in the work. What they do is simply amazing. The have shown sketches and first draft of 3D rendering that seemed fine to me, but where rejected. That was the problem exactly they were just fine, somethings were off, they didn’t feel exactly like the rest of the site; back to the drawing board!”

It seems they got the message when we talk about storytelling & details at least :)

We also had the chance to check out some of the other presentations. It was great to meet Scott Hansen, (ISO50) again, who talked about ”Blending Analog and Digital”. He did a great talk about inspiration and his thoughts behind his work. We talked a lot about e-commerce on the evening and ever since I met him in Barcelona 2007 I have been very interested to start my own shop like his. So if everything turns out well, I will have my own shop pretty soon.

It was also great to meet our old friend from Skellefteå & Paregos again; Marcus Eriksson (Subdisc & WeAreAcademy). They are doing some really great stuff in Vancover!

Other presentations I saw worth mention are;

Bartek Drozdz, “From Flash to Unity (And Back)”
He was showing some stuff he had made with Unity, a new 3D technology for the web. He visited our office a couple of weeks before Toronto and I was already then blown away by the possibilities of Unity.

Takayuki (fladdict) Fukatsu, “Cool Japanese Hour!”
He talked about his own company Art & Mobile who creates iPhone applications. Amazing how big the market is for these kind of products. He told us he had over 600 000 downloads so far, which is very impressive! He also presented a iPhone Book for children where he had combined an iPhone with a children’s book. I am sure we will see more of these products in the future!

Jared Ficklin, “Eyes Can Hear, 5 Ways“
As I saw Barteks presentation I just had the chance to see the end of Jareds talk which was also very interesting topic! He gave RFID tags to over 3000 people at a big event and made data visualization of it. Everything from how much beer they where drinking to how long time they spent at the toilet. Awesome!

John Underkoffler, “It Has To Be This”
Great to see how Oblong Industries created the interfaces for Minority Report and how they did it in real life. John is a MIT graduate and was science adviser also at Iron Man and Aeon Flux.

That´s all. We hope to see North Kingdom at FITC in the future as well :)

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